Goldsmiths Prize Shortlistee Attention Seeking Behaviour Reviewed

Aea Varfis-van Warmelo's debut novel, Attention Seeking Behaviour, has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Guardian's review calls it a compelling interrogation of memory, justice and truth that offers no easy answers. The book opens with a confession that doubles as a warning: "I have never told this story before." The narrator, who shares the author's own name, then tells the reader directly that she is a liar.

That opening manoeuvre places the novel in a long and distinguished lineage. The review situates it beside Humbert Humbert's self-justifying account of abuse in Lolita and the devastating misinterpretation at the heart of Ian McEwan's Atonement. In both cases, the trope of the unreliable narrator exposes the dangerous gap between the stories people tell and the truths those stories obscure. Varfis-van Warmelo, a British-Greek author, inherits that tradition and pushes it toward the reader: the review argues that in Attention Seeking Behaviour, the reader is asked to examine their own capacity for trust.

Who is the narrator?

The central figure is a young woman who aspires to be a writer. She has paused her postgraduate degree in poetry. She works unfulfilling jobs that demand little from her, and she has a lot of sex, which she describes as offering her "solitude".

She does all of this while lying compulsively. The review itemises the range of her dishonesty:

• She lies for fun.
• She lies to flirt.
• She lies to steal.
• She lies for sympathy.
• She lies out of a desire to hurt others.
• She also lies to preserve her own privacy.

Lying is, as the narrator claims, universal — though success at lying, she concedes, is not.

What does her lying reveal?

The narrator draws a sharp moral line between herself and the world's professional deceivers. She regards fraudsters and scammers with derision. In her eyes they are "divorced from reality" and give her "second hand embarrassment". Her own lies, she insists, are somehow purer.

That self-serving distinction is precisely where the novel's tension lives. A narrator who admits she is a liar, then ranks her lies above everyone else's, leaves the reader without stable ground — which appears to be the point of a book the Guardian describes as an interrogation of memory, justice and truth that refuses easy answers.

What does this change for the reader?

The Goldsmiths Prize shortlisting signals that formally inventive, morally uneasy fiction of this kind now sits at the centre of British literary conversation rather than its margins. The prize rewards novels that break the mould of traditional fiction, and a debut built on a confessed liar's voice fits that brief exactly. Readers who pick it up will find no trustworthy guide inside its pages — only the test of their own judgement, conducted review by review, page by page.