Aleema Omotoni, the award-winning British-Nigerian author of Everyone’s Thinking It, returns with Winners & Liars, a YA mystery that combines literary puzzles, family secrets, romance, and a fight over a Victorian estate. Published by HarperCollins in June 2026, the novel follows a group of ambitious students drawn into an inheritance competition where the winner takes everything.

Omotoni’s debut, Everyone’s Thinking It, won the 2024 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work—Youth/Teens. Her work centres Black teenagers coming of age, falling in love, and navigating contemporary and fantastical worlds. 

With Winners & Liars, she moves into a more elaborate mystery. The story centres on Derin, a British-Nigerian student whose acceptance into Cambridge marks the end of her school years. Alongside the other members of the fiercely competitive Kenfield Set, she attends Professor Darnley’s summer ball expecting a celebration. Instead, they find themselves at the centre of an extraordinary will reading.

Omotoni has described Winners & Liars as “Knives Out meets Dead Poets Society”, a contemporary YA mystery about family, friendship, love, loss, and the whitewashing of history. She has also said that she wanted to have fun with the book, drawing on what she learnt from her history degrees while building the competition at its centre. Remarkably, she wrote the novel in a month. 

That sense of play sits alongside the book’s more serious questions. The inheritance is not simply about who gets to own an old English house; it is also about the stories attached to that house and what happens when those stories have been distorted or deliberately erased. The novel’s mystery therefore unfolds on two levels: Derin has to figure out who she can trust while also confronting what the people who came before her have chosen to hide.

The book has already earned starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal, with Kirkus praising its “deeply developed characters”, shocking twists, and exploration of the consequences of whitewashed history. 

With Winners & Liars, Omotoni turns an inheritance game into something bigger: a story about ambition, belonging, and the histories people inherit and sometimes have to uncover for themselves.

Here is the synopsis:
Derin’s acceptance into Cambridge University is the end of an era—just not the one she expected. When she and her ultra-competitive uni prep group, the Kenfield Set, are first invited to Professor Darnley’s summer ball, they expect to celebrate their success at his historic Kenfield estate. Instead, they arrive for his will reading. When the Darnleys’ aristocratic children are disinherited, the students are offered the chance to compete in a Victorian, literary-inspired inheritance competition to become the new heir. For Derin, winning could help her working-class family. But as the Darnleys fight to keep their home, a mysterious note points to a dark family secret. Soon, Derin must navigate the games, scheming relatives, a charming intern, and the growing suspicion that the history behind the inheritance is soaked in lies and blood.

Buy Winners & Liars here.