'By the final pages of Richard James Allen’s debut novel, More Lies, the reader is no closer to discovering the truth about the unnamed narrator’s wild story, but such ambiguity is exactly the point. ‘The truth is,’ our notoriously unreliable protagonist confesses, ‘I need you to hear me, to see me’ (p. 53) and it is a powerful request. Allen asks his readers to fulfil their basic, most intrinsic role of giving life to a text. If, as German literary scholar Wolfgang Iser contends, ‘it is only through inevitable omissions that a story will gain its dynamism’ (1972, p. 280), then More Lies is as vibrant and as engaging as they come.' (Introduction)