Little Liar
Little Liar
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Leigh Rivers on Little Liar
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
The duet that found its readers firstBefore Rivers could trace the origin of the duet in any interview, the duet had already traced its own path. In a video conversation about their publication journey, they described the sequence in which readers discovered their work: the Web of Silence books arrived in the wider consciousness ahead of other projects, which shaped how Rivers’s career developed rather than the other way around.
I know little also little stranger and little liar’s kind of what popped off first. [paraphrased from audio]
That momentum changed the pressure around the second book. Rivers was finishing a conclusion readers were already waiting for, not pitching a story into the unknown.
Their author bio frames the entire creative project in terms of a deliberate emotional target. Written in the third person on their own website, it positions the reader’s experience as the governing ambition: not a theme to explore, not a subgenre to work in, but a specific effect to produce.
Leigh Rivers is a Scottish Biomedical Scientist who has ventured into the world of writing dark, morally gray characters with rollercoaster storylines to drive her readers wild.
How they wrote it
Building a standalone inside a connected worldRivers faced a specific design problem with Little Liar: the book concludes a duet while sharing characters with a separate trilogy, The Edge of Darkness, that some readers will have read and others will not. On their website’s page for the book, they named the solution directly, drawing a precise line between what the books share and what they require of each other.
Side characters from The Edge of Darkness appear within Little Liar, and could contain some minor spoilers to the trilogy, but it does not need to be read first as the storylines do not cross.
The distinction matters in practice. Readers new to Rivers can enter at Little Liar without a gap in comprehension; readers of the trilogy get additional texture without the book depending on it.
Format followed form. In the same video interview where they discussed the duet’s early readership, Rivers flagged a production decision about Little Liar that fits a story built around tightly held, competing perspectives: one character’s silence, another’s obsession, each voice distinct.
I think it’s Little Liar, it’s been announced as a full cast. [paraphrased from audio]
Rivers writes their own content warnings, and the language on that page is precise in a way that amounts to a structural choice. One item in the list of warnings is treated differently from all the others: it gets its own sentence with a specific instruction, where every other element is listed without comment. That sentence concerns the book’s most serious subject.
There are heavy subjects on child abuse that results in mutism and this trigger should NOT be taken lightly.
What they want us to sit with
A direct ask, not a disclaimerThe content warning page on Rivers’s website opens with a statement that frames every specific warning that follows. Rather than issuing a standard list and moving on, they address the reader’s state before the reading begins, positioning that concern as personal rather than procedural.
Your mental health is extremely important to me. I highly recommend readers not to continue with this story if any of the listed warnings are triggering.
The book’s central relationship is between foster siblings who use sibling language with each other throughout. Rivers neither conceals this nor treats it as incidental to the story’s effect. In the content warning, they address it head-on, making both the fact and the limit of that fact explicit before a reader turns a single page.
They are not blood related. But if calling each other brother and sister is not your thing, please do not proceed. I beg of you.
The phrase ‘I beg of you’ is doing something distinct from the rest of the warning. Rivers is not simply flagging content; they are acknowledging that what follows is genuinely difficult and asking readers to honor that difficulty by knowing their own limits before they cross a line the book will not walk back.