<aside> 💫
SOLD AT AUCTION IN A 2-BOOK, 6-FIGURE DEAL
</aside>
A powerful YA mystery for fans of Jandy Nelson and Dustin Thao.
Celeste Muldoon is alone when the Big One finally hits the city of San Francisco, because for the first time ever, her best friend, Nicky, didn’t meet her after school. The two of them share a birthday, matching tattoos, a nerdy obsession with space travel, plans to go to college together, and pretty much everything else. So why didn’t he meet her at the library, the way they’d planned?
The earthquake has left their city in ruins, and their parents fear the worst — but Celeste doesn’t believe it. She knows Nicky’s spent their last year of high school doing homework for rich kids, earning money to pay for college, and that the scandal was about to be exposed. Just days ago, Nicky had told Celeste about his plan to vanish, to reinvent himself and escape the disaster he’d created, but now she can’t convince anyone that he could still be alive… except Meo, a captivating stranger who tells her Nicky was mixed up in more trouble than Celeste ever knew.
When Celeste finds Nicky’s journal, it sends her on a quest across her broken city, up the California coast through towns sheltering quake refugees, and all the way to Florida. With Meo’s help, she’s sure she’ll find Nicky. But how far will she go to do it, and what will it cost her?
Lies We Tell About the Stars is Susie Nadler’s debut, written while she was Brown Handler writer-in-residence at Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. She’s also been a resident fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts and the Espy Foundation. Her fiction has been published in Story, The Greensboro Review, Inkwell, and New American Writing, and she has an MFA from the University of Montana. She lives in her hometown of San Francisco, where she’s a school librarian.
<aside> 💫
PRAISE
</aside>
“Celeste’s palpable anxiety and complex feelings about her future will be well understood by many teens. A wise, gripping, and poignant tale of a teen finding her way.” – Kirkus
“A riveting mystery with real-world stakes.” – Julian Axelrod for Booklist
“[A] savvy and riveting debut. Propulsive close-third-person narration feels authentic as it reveals Celeste’s insecurities and chronicles her deepening attraction to Meo. Alternating chapters detail happenings from before the earthquake and count the days following the event, injecting suspense and drama into a tightly woven exploration of friendship, grief, and self-discovery.” – Publishers Weekly
WE Publisher: Dutton Children’s Books (Penguin Random House), March 2026
WE Editor: Andrew Karre
Primary Agent: Molly Ker Hawn
Film/TV Rights: DHA
Extent: 87,000 words
All rights available