Want to learn the ideas in We Were Liars better than ever? Read the world’s #1 book summary of We Were Liars by E. Lockhar here.

Read a brief 1-Page Summary or watch video summaries curated by our expert team. Note: this book guide is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher or author, and we always encourage you to purchase and read the full book.

Video Summaries of We Were Liars

We’ve scoured the Internet for the very best videos on We Were Liars, from high-quality videos summaries to interviews or commentary by E. Lockhar.

1-Page Summary of We Were Liars

Overall Summary

A young girl named Cady Eastman has a wealthy family, and every summer she goes to their private island near Martha’s Vineyard. She spends her summers with her cousins Johnny and Mirren. When they’re teenagers, a boy named Gat is brought into the family by his aunt Carrie Sinclair. He falls in love with Cady but there are tensions due to the fact that he is an outsider from India who doesn’t fit in well in this old New England family.

The Sinclairs are an old New England family. The Sinclairs have three daughters, Penny, Carrie and Bess. Each of the sisters has a large house on Beechwood Island and an enormous inheritance from their father. Their father is very wealthy and they all need his money to survive. The insular family structure is overwhelming for outsiders, who can’t handle being in such close quarters with each other all the time. When Cady’s father leaves her mother at the beginning of the book, he notes that he cannot take it any more because there was too much pressure living as a Sinclair. All of the sisters’ marriages end in divorce when they marry men who are not part of their families or society like Ed, Gat, etc. Harris pays lip service to equality yet reveals surprising bigotry when he doesn’t want his granddaughter dating Gat because she will be marrying someone outside her race.

A family is torn apart when the father dies. The three sisters, Carrie, Penny and Bess believe that they deserve more of his inheritance than each other. This causes a lot of tension between them as well as their children Johnny, Mirren and Cady who are asked to lobby for one or two of their mothers. The sisters have little income on their own so depend heavily on this money which makes things worse because Harris often pits them against each other in order to maintain control over them all.

Cady is fifteen years old when she gets into a serious accident that leaves her in the hospital with head trauma. She can’t remember what happened to cause the injury, so she asks her mother for answers but doesn’t get any. When Cady’s father decides to take them on vacation to Europe instead of returning home as usual, Cady becomes confused and sad because she misses her friends from Beechwood Island and never hears back from them.

When Cady is 17, she returns to the island with her mother and reunites with her closest friends. Gat still loves her and they continue their romance away from their parents. The house that used to be called Clairmont has been renovated by Harris and re-named New Clairmont.

Cady is glad to be home with her family for the summer, but she wants to know what happened that night. She asks everyone about it, but they tell her not to worry about it and just focus on getting better. Cady decides to map out all of the clues in her bedroom like a detective working on a case.

With the help of Johnny, Mirren and Gat, Cady eventually remembers that Ed proposed to Carrie but she refused because she thought it would jeopardize her inheritance. The Liars also recall their plan to burn down Clairmont (the big house) since they felt it was keeping them apart. They each started a fire in different parts of the house and didn’t expect for the fire to spread so quickly or trap everyone inside.

Cady’s friends were killed in a car accident, but she had no memory of it. She spent the summer with them as ghosts and then said goodbye before returning to her family.

Part 1: Welcome

The Sinclair family appears to be perfect. They’re wealthy, well-to-do Democrats who have beautiful blond hair and athletic builds. Despite the fact that their money is running out, they seem to smile a lot and are very friendly with each other despite having hidden bottles of pills in the house.