Amber is the first-person narrator and protagonist of the novel, and defining her character is a challenge given that she admits that she is a compulsive liar and admits to pretending to be someone she is not in critical relationships including in her workplace, her family, and her marriage. Amber explains at one point how every morning she dons her face like an outfit and says, “I unzip the body of who I used to be and step outside myself; a newborn Russian doll […] wondering how many other versions of me are still hidden inside” (252). She even goes by two different names, Amber and Taylor. Everything she admits, including that she lies, might be a lie. Plunged into her claustrophobic perception, the reader must sort through prevarications, obfuscations, and elaborate smokescreens to get even a sense of Amber Reynolds’s character. The intimacy conventionally associated with a first-person narration collapses into irony, as the reader must decide whether they are another victim of Amber’s very coaxing strategy of protecting herself through evasion.

Amber has been in a nasty car accident on Christmas afternoon, 2016. Thirty-something, she works as a kind of glorified personal assistant to a dictatorial radio celebrity whose long-running morning show has become iconic on BBC radio.