The Lies They Told - Paperback

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by Ellen Marie Wiseman (Author)

A Simultaneous Hardcover Edition--Also Available as Trade Paperback Original

In rural 1930s Virginia, a young immigrant mother fights for her dignity and those she loves against America's rising eugenics movement - when widespread support for policies of prejudice drove imprisonment and forced sterilizations based on class, race, disability, education, and country of origin - in this tragic and uplifting novel of social injustice, survival, and hope for readers of Susan Meissner, Kristin Hannah, and Christina Baker Kline.

When Lena Conti--a young, unwed mother--sees immigrant families being forcibly separated on Ellis Island, she vows not to let the officers take her two-year old daughter. But the inspection process is more rigorous than she imagined, and she is separated from her mother and teenage brother, who are labeled burdens to society, denied entry, and deported back to Germany. Now, alone but determined to give her daughter a better life after years of living in poverty and near starvation, she finds herself facing a future unlike anything she had envisioned.

Silas Wolfe, a widowed family relative, reluctantly brings Lena and her daughter to his weathered cabin in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains to care for his home and children. Though the hills around Wolfe Hollow remind Lena of her homeland, she struggles to adjust. Worse, she is stunned to learn the children in her care have been taught to hide when the sheriff comes around. As Lena meets their neighbors, she realizes the community is vibrant and tight knit, but also senses growing unease. The State of Virginia is scheming to paint them as ignorant, immoral, and backwards so they can evict them from their land, seize children from parents, and deal with those possessing "inferior genes."

After a social worker from the Eugenics Office accuses Lena of promiscuity and feeblemindedness, her own worst fears come true. Sent to the Virginia State Colony for the Feebleminded and Epileptics, Lena faces impossible choices in hopes of reuniting with her daughter--and protecting the people, and the land, she has grown to love.

Author Biography

Ellen Marie Wiseman is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author known for the compassion, authenticity, and depth with which her novels explore real historical injustices. Born and raised in Three Mile Bay, a tiny hamlet in northern New York, she's a first-generation German American who discovered her love of reading and writing while attending first grade in one of the last one-room schoolhouses in New York State. Since then, her novels have been published worldwide, translated into more than twenty languages, and sold nearly two million copies in the United States alone. She lives with her family on the shores of Lake Ontario. Visit her online at EllenMarieWiseman.com.

Number of Pages: 416

Dimensions: 1.2 x 8.2 x 5.5 IN

Publication Date: July 29, 2025