The Liars Club
By Jaimi Reyes
Every morning for forty-some years, the same old men have met at the same time, at the same table, in the same Maple Creek coffee shop. They call themselves The Liars Club, and they’ve earned it. Every fish gets bigger, every bar fight gets longer, and every story has just enough truth in it to keep you listening. Then there’s Jim. Jim’s stories are the wildest of all, and nobody believes a word of them.
But every year there’s another empty chair at that table, and fewer friends healthy enough to hit the road with Jim and come home with new stories to tell. So the summer before his senior year, Jim’s grandson Jesse gets dragged along for three months of back roads, truck stops and giant roadside dinosaurs. Jesse would rather be anywhere else. It’s his last year of high school, college is coming fast, and he’s supposed to be figuring out who he is, not stuck in a truck with his grandpa.
Somewhere between the first flat tire and the last sunset, things start happening to them. Things nobody back home is ever going to believe. And Jesse starts to realize his grandpa was never really one of the liars. He just lived a life too strange to sound true.
The brief: A funny, heartbreaking crossover novel about a grandfather, a grandson, and a club of old men who tell tall tales. Using only coffee shop items themselves (donuts, coffee, the morning paper), the cover has to carry the humor, the loss, and the one regular whose stories are true.
The directions:
Humor in the type. The C in CLUB is a bitten donut. The joke lives right in the title. (Shown in pink and cream.)
One bite, one idea. The bold, commercial take: the title wraps around a single bitten caramel donut.
The odd one out. A box of regulars, one that doesn’t match, and the gaps where friends used to be.
The morning paper. A half-finished crossword, a circled obituary and a cup of coffee going cold: the whole book on one page. (Shown in green and sepia.)
Behind the story: This one is personal. The Liars Club is real: my grandpa and his friends, meeting at the same coffee shop for years, trading stories. I started road-tripping with him when I was five, and by the time I was about twelve, our trips stretched to three whole months every summer. We came home with stories so outlandish that people thought we were making them up, but they were true. Years later, with my grandpa in his eighties and nineties, the roles flipped. I did the driving and took him to the last few states he hadn’t yet traveled and camped in, until he’d crossed off every one. The Liars Club comes from all of it: my grandpa, his friends, and every wild story nobody believed.