A Pack of Lies

Ginny slips through the cracks of her parents divorce and grows up like a weed, undernourished in motherly love and overnourished in all the wrong ways from sucking it up wherever she can. Ginny is potent, addictive, and as delicious and nutritious as nicotine. Sometimes tragic, sometimes funny but always sexy, she improvises her way through her days with unintended honesty and compulsive joy, and very little morality of the conventional kind. This Pack of Lies is Ginny s ruthless look at her unlikely life in Bombay in the eighties. She is quite unintentionally disturbing in her look at divorce, incest, friendship, and sexuality. Ignoring the way things should be, she makes us question them. It is not Ginny who lies, but the world around her that refuses her candor, denies her truths, and turns her away as the girl who cries wolf. She is uncompromising and truthful, at least with herself. In a life measured by touch and taste, there seems very little, after all, to lie about. This novel feels uncomfortably like a memoir, but, as the title declares, it is A Pack of Lies.