Fayette Fox

Fayette Fox is, like Ivy - the eight year old protagonist in her novel The Deception Artist - a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the writer and her character shared similar experiences of growing up in Northern California in the grip of the 1980s recession with only their active imaginations for company.

Fox’s novel follows a family navigating the pitfalls of living through difficult times. They face redundancy, illness and financial hardship, and the strain that these problems put on relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives. In the middle of this fraught family is Ivy, who is using her vivid imagination as a coping mechanism, using lies as escapism and to make people find her more interesting.

The Deception Artist is a story about a very likeable little liar, and about the adults in her life who also make things up to get through their days, and there is a conversation bubbling under the surface of the novel about where make believe ends and whether white lies are really harmless if they remain undetected.

Fayette Fox began writing The Deception Artist in response to the National Novel Writing Month challenge: write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. The novel took a little longer than that; five years in total, but the result is a gripping and cliché-free story that has already seen Fox nominated for an Amazon Rising Star Award. The book was in the running for our 2013 First Book Award.

Buy the eBook.