Excerpt from The Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The five of them stood there, and although they weren't particularly good-looking as individuals, standing there at the counter they seemed to Nofar to be incredibly beautiful. They shone with the glow of being a clique, as if the fact that there were five of them made each of them appear at least five times more beautiful. They examined the row of flavors spread out before them, trying to decide, and for a moment Nofar dared to hope they wouldn't recognize her. But finally Yotam raised his beautiful eyes from the ice cream to the counter, frowned slightly and said, "Hey, you go to school with us." The others looked up. Nofar fought the urge to avert her eyes. "You're in Shir's class, right?" Moran asked as she pulled her hair back into a ponytail in a gesture that was as ordinary as it was charming. Nofar nodded quickly. Yes. She was in Shir's class. In fact, she had sat next to Shir since the second grade, until that morning four months ago when she arrived at school to find that Shir had fired her without even a letter of warning.

There was a moment of silence before Yotam said, "So, I'll take cookie dough." Nofar had already begun piling ice cream into a cup when he said, "In a cone." And that, in fact, was all Yotam said to her, because immediately after that the others began telling her what flavors and toppings they wanted, and Moran added in a tone brimming with insincere amiability that they needed to get their ice cream in a hurry because the movie they wanted to see started in twenty minutes. And all the while, Shir stood silently looking at Nofar, a small expression of guilt on her face, until she finally said she'd have vanilla. She didn't have to say it—Nofar knew what flavor Shir liked. Five minutes later they were already outside, on their way to the movie. Nofar looked at the sorbets displayed under the counter in flowering layers of red and orange. Dozens of fingerprints covered the glass partition in front of her, all made by fingers pointing at the ice cream, never at her.

The glass door opened and a gang of noisy children burst inside. When this day was over, she'd play music she liked, not the songs that Gaby insisted attracted customers. She'd still have to pick up all the napkins people had dropped and the sticky spoons parents hadn't felt like throwing away after their kids finished their ice cream. She'd still have to wash the floor, scrub the fingerprints off the partition, and take out the garbage, but it would be her music in the background. Then she'd fill a Styrofoam box with ice cream and take it to the homeless guy who stood near the fountain. Or maybe she'd just put it down not far from him, because the last time she went up to him he had shouted some garbled words at her that she didn't completely understand.

She'd been daydreaming too long about the homeless guy and the ice cream, and about the gang at the movies without her, because when she looked around she saw that the kids had taken off with their ice cream without paying. Gaby would deduct it from her salary. A large lump of misery filled her throat and she took a deep breath and swallowed it whole. Six and a half hours to go. If only this day would end already.

She didn't know that this day would end differently from all the days she had known before, that this day would change all the days that followed, that this was absolutely the last day she would be nothing more than a drab ice-cream server.

Excerpted from The Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen . Copyright © 2019 by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen . Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.