Ginny is an unlikely heroine and Dehpande writes her with an insouciance and almost savant honesty that will make you laugh, cry and think. I loved this debut novel for her fresh, simple and yet vivid prose, her complex characters, and for her uncanny ability to familiarise us with them in one deft description. Both searingly poignant and heartbreakingly funny, you'll read this book with your eyes but feel it with your heart. --Nikki Bedi, BBC Asian Network

A Pack of Lies tells gorgeous and brutal truths... so taut and electric as to be flammable ... Boundaries crossed, trust violated, a poor little rich girl effectively abandoned, suddenly hungry. Each of these elements allows us to inhabit the protagonist's life in a way so intimate, so filled with sensual pleasures of food and the fabulous excitement of fame, that we almost miss what is, at heart, a novel about loneliness, a primer on lust, and most of all, an extraordinary window on the secrets of a young woman for whom resistance to gendered rules becomes a source of jeopardy, and yet, eventually, of salvation. --Sheila Curran, author of Everyone She Loved and Diana Lively is Falling Down

A Pack of Lies? Maybe but this is brimming with the kind of honesty that will have readers gasping, blushing, and laughing. The story comes alive on every page, in every line, from tasting an entire ocean in a single oyster to the way that each new love, and lust, is a way of renewing life. The author finds the quick in a young girl's infatuations, and in a woman's mysterious longings, in pages that readers across the globe will be up late at night reading until they do finally close their eyes, and still, the characters will linger, a love will not let go. --Paul Shepherd, author of More Like Not Running Away