Necessary Lies Books in Order

The Necessary Lies grouping centers on a rural North Carolina family and the young social worker who becomes entangled in their lives during the early 1960s. It includes the short prequel The First Lie and the full-length novel Necessary Lies, which can be read on their own but are richer together.

Set in 1958, The First Lie introduces thirteen-year-old Ivy Hart, who lives on a tobacco farm as a tenant farmer with her pregnant older sister Mary Ella and their ailing grandmother. Ivy and her best friend Henry sneak moments of freedom where they can, but the family’s poverty and the secrecy surrounding Mary Ella’s baby hint that the girls’ futures are not entirely their own. The story plants early clues about the county’s social services system and the power it holds over poor, uneducated families.

Necessary Lies moves forward to 1960 and alternates between Ivy’s perspective and that of Jane Forrester, a young newly married social worker. Jane is idealistic and quickly becomes invested in her clients’ lives, especially Ivy’s troubled household. As Jane learns more about the state’s eugenics program—under which poor women and girls, many of them Black or from tenant families, are sterilized without true consent—she’s forced to reckon with what “help” really means.

For Ivy, social workers have always been figures of authority who can remove a child or decide who gets medical care. Jane is the first one who seems to see her as a full person. Yet even Jane is constrained by laws, supervisors and her own marriage. The novel traces how both women’s decisions, especially around medical procedures recommended as being in Ivy’s “best interest,” leave marks that last for decades.

The series stands out for weaving a very real and disturbing chapter of North Carolina history into an intimate family story. Chamberlain uses the Hart family and Jane’s moral dilemma to explore questions about class, power and who is deemed “fit” to have children.

Readers can start with Necessary Lies and then circle back to The First Lie for added context, or read them in chronological order to move through Ivy’s life as she experiences it.