We Were Liars: The 5 Biggest Changes from Book to Show

This post contains spoilers for We Were Liars.

The lone body of a woman on a beach is rarely a good sign—just ask the affluent characters of Netflix’s The Perfect Couple or HBO’s Big Little Lies. That same holds for Prime Video’s We Were Liars, an eight-episode TV adaptation of the mystery YA novel published in 2014, but popularized via BookTok in 2020.

Both E. Lockhart’s book and the series from showrunners Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries) and Carina Adly Mackenzie (Roswell, New Mexico), begin with heroine Cadence Sinclair Eastman (Emily Alyn Lind) washed ashore outside of her family’s secluded property on a private island off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The eldest grandchild of wealthy media mogul Harris Sinclair (David Morse) and his wife, Tipper (Wendy Crewson), doesn’t know how she got there, where her clothes went, or why none of her similarly-aged cousins, who call themselves the Liars, can give her any clarity.

The show cuts back and forth between Cadence’s post-traumatic amnesia and the events that led up to it the previous summer. Her mother Penny (Caitlin FitzGerald) has forbidden Cadence’s aunts Carrie (Mamie Gummer) and Bess (Candice King) from speaking about the incident. Also sworn to secrecy are the Liars: Carrie’s son Johnny (Joseph Zada), Bess’ daughter Mirren (Esther McGregor), and Gat (Shubham Maheshwari), the nephew of Carrie’s longtime boyfriend Ed (Rahul Kohli). But familial infighting soon gives way to secrets about the Sinclair dynasty—and insight about Cadence’s fate.

Ahead, a look at the biggest differences between the We Were Liars book and TV adaptation, from more insight about Johnny’s sexuality to a new twist on that shocking ending.

A Missing Timeline and Character

The original novel chronicles multiple summers, named for how old Cadence is during each season. Cadence and Gat begin to fall in love during summer 14. Grandmother Tipper dies before summer 15—the same year of Cadence’s accident. In summer 17, Cadence returns to Beechwood Island searching for answers about the previous year. But the show condenses the story into just two timelines: before Cadence’s accident, and after. All of major plot points take place in summer 16, including Grandmother’s sudden death from heart failure.

In the TV series, there’s also a major character missing from the Sinclair family tree. That would be Taft, the youngest son of Bess Sinclair. In the book, Taft’s main contribution to the story is his concern over Cadence’s Percocet addiction—a worry that gets doled out to a slew of other characters on the show.

The Sinclair Sisters

Lockhart’s novel skims over the backstories of sisters Carrie, Penny, and Bess, the mothers of three of the titular Liars. There’s more information about them in the 2022 prequel, Family of Liars. That book is where Rosemary, “the daughter who didn’t grow up,” is first mentioned. But the series outright references their late sister, a fourth Sinclair daughter who died during childhood. She may have died due to something that happened during one of their own summers on the island—while grieving the death of her own daughter in the show’s season finale, Bess wonders if the fire is “punishment” for “what we did.”

The show also delves further into each Sinclair sister’s fractured romantic life. In the book, each is divorced; we know that Cadence’s father was unfaithful to her mother, Penny, and that Carrie’s husband was abusive. In the series, Bess (Mirren’s mother) is still married, but the cracks in her union are clear: a day before her husband’s arrival to Beechwood, Bess begins a torrid affair with “Salty Dan,” a nearby harbor service employee. Mirren learns of her mother’s infidelity and begins to alert her father in the season’s fourth episode. But he shuts her down—perhaps willing to overlook his wife’s cheating because he’s secretly stolen all the money from her previously untouched trust fund.

Johnny’s Sexuality

Johnny, the eldest Sinclair grandson, is something of a tortured soul on page and screen. But the series more explicitly portrays some of his internal woes. Namely, Johnny is gay—a disclosure embraced by his cousins, but dismissed by his mother. Complicating this fact is that Johnny might have burgeoning romantic feelings for his tennis partner, Blake, who is also involved with his cousin Mirren. In the book, Mirren boasts about her relationship with an older guy, only to later confess that she made the whole thing up to impress Cadence.

Johnny’s complex dynamic with Blake can also be traced back to a violent private school altercation that left a fellow classmate hospitalized. His mother, Carrie, paid off everyone involved with the incident, but Blake still has a video of Johnny’s violent act and is blackmailing him with it. In order to secure the payment, Carrie needs to get her share of the inheritance early—but Harris won’t give her the cash unless she breaks up with her boyfriend, Ed, in order to keep the Sinclair bloodline “pure.”

Cadence’s Standoff With Her Grandfather

In both the book and show, Cadence confronts her grandfather Harris about his racism towards Ed and Gat. But the series makes this point far more pronounced. “You don’t like me with Gat, and you don’t like Carrie with Ed,” Cadence says to Harris in the show. “You tolerated it. But when they started to talk about kids, you don’t want Indian grandchildren.” Harris refutes his granddaughter’s claims by declaring himself a staunch democrat (“By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could,” Bradley Whitford’s racist character in Get Out whispers somewhere in the distance)—but on the show, Cadence is far less easily placated by this than she is in the novel.

In addition to facing her own prejudices—Cadence can be seen reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson in one scene—she also refuses to cooperate with a splashy Time Magazine spread that Harris hopes will quiet rumors of a Sinclair family curse. “I don’t want to be an heir,” Cadence declares, not even swayed by Harris telling her that he knows the fire that struck their summer property was not caused by faulty wiring, but arson by his grandchildren.

Eventually, Cadence chooses to honor Gat by telling the Time reporter that she’s “really not into fairy tales anymore,” before hopping into a boat, floating away from the estate, and chucking her grandmother’s priceless black pearls into the water below.

The Ending

Rest assured, devoted fans of the We Were Liars book: Lockhart’s central twist hasn’t been changed. At the end of the show, as at the end of the novel, we learn that Cadence is the sole survivor of the fire she and her cousins set, and she’s been conversing with their ghosts all of summer 17. (The gang was supposed to watch The Sixth Sense together the night most of them perished, to underscore the whole “I see dead people” twist.)

After spending the majority of her vacation attempting to remember the previous summer, Cadence finally accepts that her grandfather’s mansion, Clairmont, had to be totally rebuilt because she and the other Liars torched it. The arson, we learn, was her idea: “What if we made a mess so big only a Sinclair could clean it up?” Cadence asks her cousins around a bonfire one night. The teens then decide to burn down their grandfather’s home, which they view as the source of all their family’s generational pain.

Cadence, Johnny, and Mirren plan to swipe some boat fuel and each set a separate floor of the mansion ablaze, before fleeing the property and meeting at the dock, where Gat will be waiting with the getaway vessel. But things go sideways when Cadence realizes that the family’s two dogs are still trapped inside the house. So are Johnny and Mirren, who get engulfed on higher floors as Gat, too, races back into the house, wondering why none of his fellow Liars have made it to the dock by the stroke of midnight. “Turns out we didn’t really know how to do arson,” Johnny’s ghost tells a hallucinatory Cadence.

When the house’s gas main exploded, Cadence was blown back into the water, where she later washed ashore and was found on the beach by her mother. Besides the obvious survivors’ guilt, Cadence is also plagued by the fact that she wasted time in the burning house retrieving her grandmother’s black pearls—the ones Tipper’s daughters coveted and fought over until the bitter end. “You died because of that necklace,” Cadence tells Gat’s ghost, ashamed of her inherited impulse to prioritize material possessions over people.

Eventually, on the show, Cadence comes to terms with her culpability in the Liars’ deaths and vows to start over. But unlike the book, that’s not where this story ends. The series concludes with Carrie—Johnny’s mother, who has been sober for a decade—returning to her house on Beechwood to pop some stashed-away pills. But she’s stopped in her tracks by the ghost of her late son sitting on a countertop nearby. “I thought you’d left,” she tells him. “I don’t think I can,” he replies, suggesting that the elder Sinclair boy is either haunting his mother’s mansion or stuck in some kind of purgatory. That leaves the door open for a second season—one which contends with Carrie’s own past summer traumas, as outlined in the prequel book, Family of Liars.