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WORK TITLE: None of This Is True
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CITY: London
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: CANR 308
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PERSONAL
Born July 19, 1968, in London, England; daughter of Anthony (a textile agent) and Kay (a secretary) Jewell; married second husband, Jascha (a technology consultant); children: Amelie Mae, Evie Scarlett.
EDUCATION:Attended Barnet College; graduated from Epsom School of Art and Design (fashion illustration).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Worked in the fashion industry in London, England, including as a public relations assistant for Warehouse and a receptionist for Thomas Pink, and as a secretary for Jermyn Street.
AWARDS:Melissa Nathan Award for best comedy romance, Melissa Nathan Foundation, 2008, for 31 Dream Street; House of Horrors Award for Most Dysfunctional Family, Dead Good Reader Awards, 2018, for Then She Was Gone; Book of the Year—Crime and Thriller prize, British Book Awards, 2024, for None of This Is True.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
After attending college to pursue a career in art, design, and fashion, British writer Lisa Jewell became disillusioned with the “cut-throat” world of fashion and eventually began taking evening classes in creative writing at her local adult education college in London. It was here that she discovered her talent and passion for writing, and she has since published several well-received novels, usually set in modern-day England and featuring comedic and romantic elements.
“When I was between jobs as a twentysomething, still thinking that writing books was something only self-referential men and middle-aged women did, I read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby,” Jewell told Michelle Bowles in an interview for a website called What Is That Book About. “It turned my thinking around and made me realise that there was a market for a younger, lighter, contemporary voice, and that it needed to be female. I started writing my first novel later that week.”
Jewell’s first published novel was Ralph’s Party, which became an international best seller even though some reviewers dismissed it. For instance, in the New York Times Book Review, Barbara Sutton referred to it as a “sitcom novel.” Others offered praise, however. A Kirkus Reviews contributor described Ralph’s Party as “a shameless flirt of a first novel that traces the roller-coaster lives of six people sharing the same London brownstone.” The reviewer noted that “the author casts a perceptive eye on the difficulty of relationships.” A Publishers Weekly commentator called the book a “light delight” that comes to “an amusing denouement.”
Jewell followed Ralph’s Party with Thirtynothing, “another hip and happening comic love story,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor, complete with “endearing characters and fine comic timing.” Two friends, Digby and Nadine, are thirty-year-old Londoners whose relationships with others have all been casual. When an old love comes back into Digby’s life, Nadine begins to realize that her friend is the man she has loved all along. Jennifer Wulff, reviewing in People, found Thirtynothing a “witty British import” that tells the story of Digby and Nadine in a way that “is not in the least predictable” and includes “dozens of laugh-out-loud moments.” A Publishers Weekly critic remarked that the book’s best attribute might be “Jewell’s keen observation of British pop culture.” Whitney Scott, writing in Booklist, commented that “Jewell’s latest saucy and slangy love story should entertain audiences beyond the U.K.”
Jewell followed up Thirtynothing with One-Hit Wonder, which Library Journal contributor May Brozio-Andrews called “an engaging coming-of-age tale skillfully told by interweaving the past and present.” Booklist contributor Kathleen Hughes labeled it “part mystery, part Brit-pop fiction,” noting Jewell’s “masterful way of unraveling a story bit by bit to pique the reader’s interest.”
After publishing A Friend of the Family, Jewell released Vince & Joy, “a deliciously addictive read filled with London oddballs, horrid husbands and romantic destiny,” in the words of a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Vince Mellon and Joy Downer, a pair of misfit teenagers, meet at a seaside resort while vacationing with their families. They fall in love but, through a series of misunderstandings, lose touch with one another. As the years pass, they both endure a series of failed relationships until fate brings them together once again. Entertainment Weekly reviewer Clarissa Cruz praised the novel, calling it a “realistic, often dark portrayal of modern love,” and a Publishers Weekly contributor remarked: “Jewell’s lively prose and amusing observations … effortlessly guide the story toward a satisfying ending.”
Jewell’s next novel, 31 Dream Street, was published in the United States as Roommates Wanted: Until You Fall in Love. Protagonist Toby is a fortyish, struggling poet who provides shelter to those in need in Peacock House, the rundown Victorian he has inherited. His tenants, who often fail to pay their rent, include Ruby, who is supported by a string of male admirers; Con, a mailroom clerk; Con’s mother, Melinda; and Gus, who has lived in the house for the fifteen years it has been in Toby’s care. When Gus dies, he leaves Toby money to be used to fix up the house, which he does with help from Leah, who lives across the street, and who is becoming the love Toby had hoped for. In keeping with Gus’s wishes, they renovate the house, but Toby also helps renovate the lives of his ragtag tenants, so that they can move on and so that Toby and Leah can sell the house and also make changes in their own lives.
The work received several positive notices. Hilary Hatton, reviewing Roommates Wanted in Booklist, termed it “a truly satisfying read that’s sincere without being sugary.” A Publishers Weekly contributor added that Jewell “delivers the goods: an eccentric cast, lively banter and plenty of warmhearted cheer.”
After the Party is a sequel to Ralph’s Party. Ralph and Jem, the couple introduced in the first book, are still in love after eleven years and are the parents of two children, but they have grown apart as a result of the mundane grind of daily life. Ralph takes a trip to California and returns mysteriously changed, while Jem stays in London, where she engages in a flirtation with another man. Jewell alternates the pair’s points of view while chronicling how they manage, with some difficulty, to repair their relationship.
Some reviewers saw reason to praise in the book. “The story entertainingly marches its characters along the path to finally growing up,” commented Julie Trevelyan in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly contributor called the novel “a breezy traipse through some turgid terrain,” as Jewell’s “solid cast” adds “freshness to a stale setup.” After the Party, added a Kirkus Reviews critic, is enhanced by “Jewell’s easy prose and storytelling ability.”
In The Making of Us, three very different young adults who have never met discover that they share a father; the man was a sperm donor. Lydia is a successful inventor haunted by her unhappy childhood, Dean is a directionless loner whose girlfriend has just died in childbirth, and Robyn is a medical student who has researched sperm donors because she worries that her boyfriend has so much in common with her that he may be her brother. They come together, form a friendship, and set out to find the man who fathered them.
Some reviewers found The Making of Us to be a charming tale mixing humor and poignancy. “In this odd and lovely story, Jewell makes believable the connection between these strangers, bound by biology and longing,” observed a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Jewell, remarked a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “has written a compelling and entertaining novel.” Julie Trevelyan, again writing in Booklist, described The Making of Us as “an engaging tale of choices made and not made, families lost and families gained.”
Before I Met You tells the stories of two women, one in the 1990s, one in the 1920s. Betty Dean has nursed her step-grandmother, Arlette, through a terminal illness, and when Arlette dies, she leaves Betty some money along with instructions to seek out another beneficiary, a woman named Clara Pickle, in London’s fashionable Soho neighborhood. So Betty leaves the island of Guernsey to begin a new life in Soho and find Clara. The novel chronicles Betty’s adventures along with the parallel tale of Arlette’s life in London in the Jazz Age.
Several reviewers deemed the novel appealing. It is “a tale of two remarkable young women,” commented Joy Matteson in Booklist. A Publishers Weekly contributor delivered a mixed assessment, calling the book “a capable romance with fashionable period angles, yet the general impression is perfunctory.” Booklist reviewer Trevelyan, though, maintained that “Jewell keeps the pace steady, the plot intriguing, and the characters highly relatable,” making Before I Met You a likely success.
The House We Grew Up In is the tale of a dysfunctional family with the last name Bird. The novel opens after the death of the mother, Lorelei, who has spent the latter part of her alone in a squalid apartment, even though she once lived, apparently happily, in a country home with her husband and four children. The story then explores how the family fell apart after the suicide of the youngest son, Rhys, at age sixteen. As the surviving siblings plan their mother’s funeral, they try to make sense of their lives.
Once again, Jewell received substantial critical praise. She “keeps the reader engrossed with her characters’ winding, divergent paths,” a Publishers Weekly reviewer reported. The story, remarked a Kirkus Reviews contributor, is “both witty and deeply moving.” Mara Dabrishus, writing in Library Journal, thought the action so melodramatic as to be sometimes “ridiculous,” but she allowed that the novel is “a page-turner.” Booklist commentator Susan Maguire used the latter term as well, calling the novel “an absolute page-turner” that is “cleverly” constructed.
In The Third Wife: A Novel, Jewell tells the story of a man who experiences a series of strange events after the death of his partner. Adrian Wolfe’s first marriage was with Susie. The couple were raising their two children, Cat and Luke, in the country when Adrian fell for a glamorous woman named Caroline. He divorced Susie and married her. Adrian and Caroline had three more children, Beau, Pearl, and Otis, before Adrian once again had a wandering eye and left Caroline for the much-younger Maya. Now, Adrian claims he enjoys good relationships with his ex-wives, Maya, and his five children. One day, Maya drinks too much and is struck and killed by a London bus. In the aftermath of her death, Adrian discovers that she had been receiving threatening e-mails. Then, a mysterious woman named Jane begins stalking him and his family. The volume includes sections narrated by Maya, in which she discusses her discomfort with Adrian and his family.
Susan Lobban, a reviewer on the Novelicious website, asserted: “This is an all-consuming read in which one secret leads to another and the pages turn themselves.” “Jewell’s latest book is a compelling read, the sort of book you can’t put down, even when you’ve got a pile of pressing deadlines,” remarked Emma Lee-Potter on her self-titled website. In Booklist, Maguire commented: “Jewell excels at juggling multiple perspectives to slowly peel back the layers of supposed domestic bliss.” Jennifer M. Schlau, a contributor to Library Journal, described the volume as “a great choice for readers seeking a mystery with a blended family twist.” “Taut pacing and complicated characters shape this rich examination of the modern family,” stated a critic in Kirkus Reviews.
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Jewell’s latest, The Girls in the Garden, examines how well you know your neighbors. Clare has moved with her young teenage daughters Pip and Grace to a London community after her husband was committed to a psychiatric facility. Although the community is tight knit and friendly, after a summer party, Pip finds Grace injured and unconscious, but now the neighbors are surprising quiet and guarded. Two decades ago, another teenage girl was killed in the neighborhood garden. A Kirkus Reviews contributor reported: “While Jewell creates a story ripe with anticipation and emotion, she ultimately fails to develop a climax that would bring together the several dramatic tropes.” In New York Times Book Review, Julia Sheeres said: “Faithful to the thriller genre, Jewell makes liberal use of red herrings and plot twists. But the story often gets bogged down in relationship details.”
In the suspenseful thriller I Found You, three stories set in London converge. Single mom Alice finds a man outside her beachfront home claiming he can’t remember who he is or how he got there. Young bride Lily, from Ukraine, is fraught when her husband fails to come home one night and the police say his passport is fake and he never existed. Twenty years ago on a family vacation, teenage daughter Kirsty started dating an older man who took his role as protector too far. The three-part plot reveals Jewell “as a genuinely original and skilled novelist with an impressive flair for deftly crafted narratives and surprising plot development,” according to a reviewer in Wisconsin Bookwatch. With believable characters, “her writing is strong and poetic, and her narrative is infused with just enough intrigue to keep the pages turning,” noted Library Journal critic Susan Clifford.
Jewell’s psychological thriller, The Family Upstairs, finds 25-year-old Libby Jones learning that she has inherited a large London townhouse in the fashionable Chelsea neighborhood left for her in trust. At 10 months old she was found among the bodies of her parents and another man in an apparent suicide pact and was put up for adoption. She also learns she has an older brother and sister, Henry and Lucy Lamb. Lucy is homeless living in France, and returns immediately to London to claim the inheritance. Henry has a secret—he remembers what happened the night of the suicide and how a charlatan, David Thomsen, manipulated the Lambs into letting him move his family into the house’s upstairs apartment. Nevertheless, Henry had become friends with David’s son Finn.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked: “the narratives move swiftly toward convergence in her signature style, yet with the exception of Lucy’s story, little suspense is built up.” On the other hand, a Publishers Weekly reviewer praised the book for its “Distinct, well-developed characters, shifting points of view, and a disturbing narrative that pulses with life.”
The sequel to The Family Upstairs is The Family Remains, which can be read as a stand-alone book. In London, Detective Samuel Owusu investigates the washed up bones of a murder victim connected to the cold case of an apparent suicide pact in a Chelsea mansion decades ago. Meanwhile Lucy Lamb is living with her brother Henry, but he takes off looking for his childhood friend Finn Thomsen. Rachel Rimmer has learned that her husband, Michael, was found murdered in France. Michael was once married to Lucy. “Jewell provides just enough background so as not to cheat the reader of important information. The page-turner will sate fans and win over new readers alike,” declared USA Today critic Mary Cadden. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly remarked: “By rapidly jumping around in time, Jewell effectively keeps readers off balance all the way to the happy ending.”
Jewell dials up the twists and suspense in Invisible Girl about three characters whose lives intersect. Teenager Saffyre Maddox has been seeing child psychologist Roan Fours for years, but when he ends their sessions, Saffyre stalks him and watches his perfect family through his windows. Meanwhile the Fours’ creepy neighbor Owen Pick is in his 30s and living with his aunt. He was recently fired from his teaching job after accusations of sexual misconduct. When Saffyre goes missing, “the characters begin to question their assumptions—not just of themselves, but their neighbors, spouses, children—and see them in a different light. The novel ends with a surprising twist,” according to Mary Cadden in USA Today. A Kirkus Reviews critic noted that this novel is not as dark as Jewell’s others, but “This might be a welcome change if the characters had emotional depth or unique narrative voices, but they too are only superficially realized.”
In the thriller None of This Is True, a woman is caught up in a game of cat and mouse. Celebrating her 45th birthday in a pub, podcaster Alix Summers meets housewife Josie Fair, who is also 45—they are birthday twins. When Josie learns of Alix’s supposedly glamourous life and popular true-crime programs, she tells Alix that her life is worth a show. Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40, and believes that he groomed her. After Alix is offered a Netflix special, Josie hangs around a little too often, offering Alix stories that get more outlandish, with Alix wondering if anything Josie says is true.
A Kirkus Reviews writer declared: “With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth. It’s hard to read but hard to look away from.” In Booklist, David Pitt noted how Jewell is skilled in creating ambiguous characters and “the line between good and evil continues to shift as the story progresses.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer pointed out this “pitch-dark outing and its shocking climax, but readers with a lower tolerance for nastiness should turn elsewhere.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 1, 2000, Whitney Scott, review of Thirtynothing, p. 694; May 1, 2002, Kathleen Hughes, review of One-Hit Wonder, p. 1507; February 1, 2008, Hilary Hatton, review of Roommates Wanted: Until You Fall in Love, p. 28; May 15, 2011, Julie Trevelyan, review of After the Party, p. 14; July 1, 2012, Julie Trevelyan, review of The Making of Us, p. 24; October 1, 2013, Julie Trevelyan, review of Before I Met You, p. 41; April 1, 2014, Joy Matteson, review of Before I Met You, p. 35; June 1, 2014, Susan Maguire, review of The House We Grew Up In, p. 36; May 15, 2015, Susan Maguire, review of The Third Wife: A Novel, p. 26; March 1, 2016, Stephanie Turza, review of The Girls in the Garden, p. 60; September 1, 2019, review of The Family Upstairs, p. 51; July 1, 2021, David Pitt, review of The Night She Disappeared, p. 30; July 1, 2023, David Pitt, review of None of This Is True, p. 25.
Entertainment Weekly, October 6, 2006, Clarissa Cruz, review of Vince & Joy, p. 73.
Independent (London, England), February 2, 2012, Sarah Marsh, “Lisa Jewell: ‘Getting Married Young Was the Worst Experience of My Life.’”
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1999, review of Ralph’s Party, p. 1667; November 1, 2000, review of Thirtynothing, p. 1507; August 1, 2006, review of Vince & Joy, p. 744; January 1, 2008, review of Roommates Wanted; August 1, 2011, review of After the Party; August 1, 2012, review of The Making of Us; September 15, 2013, review of Before I Met You; August 1, 2014, review of The House We Grew Up In; April 15, 2015, review of The Third Wife; April 15, 2016, review of The Girls in the Garden; February 15, 2017, review of I Found You; September 1, 2019, review of The Family Upstairs; August 1, 2020, review of Invisible Girl; June 1, 2022, review of The Family Remains; June 15, 2023, review of None of This Is True.
Library Journal, May 1, 2002, May Brozio-Andrews, review of One-Hit Wonder, p. 133; July 1, 2003, Elizabeth Mellett, review of A Friend of the Family, p. 123; September 15, 2006, Rebecca Vnuk, review of Vince & Joy, p. 48; February 15, 2008, Rebecca Vnuk, review of Roommates Wanted, p. 92; May 15, 2014, Mara Dabrishus, review of The House We Grew Up In, p. 68; May 15, 2015, Jennifer M. Schlau, review of The Third Wife, p. 71; February 15, 2017, Susan Clifford, review of I Found You, p. 79.
New York Times Book Review, January 9, 2000, Barbara Sutton, review of Ralph’s Party, p. 20; July 31, 2016, Julia Scheeres, review of The Secrets Garden, p. 21L.
People, February 12, 2001, Jennifer Wulff, review of Thirtynothing, p. 41.
Publishers Weekly, October 18, 1999, review of Ralph’s Party, p. 68; November 6, 2000, review of Thirtynothing, p. 69; May 27, 2002, review of One-Hit Wonder, p. 38; August 7, 2006, review of Vince & Joy, p. 31; January 21, 2008, review of Roommates Wanted, p. 154; May 2, 2011, review of After the Party, p. 33; June 25, 2012, review of The Making of Us, p. 146; June 23, 2014, review of The House We Grew Up In, p. 136; September 9, 2019, review of The Family Upstairs, p. 48; July 19, 2021, review of The Night She Disappeared, p. 190; June 27, 2022, review of The Family Remains, p. 39; June 26, 2023, review of None of This Is True, p. 84.
Swiss News, September, 2012, review of Before I Met You, p. 65.
USA Today, October 13, 2020, Mary Cadden, review of Invisible Girl, p. 05B; August 15, 2022, Mary Cadden, review of The Family Remains, p. 01D.
Wisconsin Bookwatch, April 2017, review of I Found You.
ONLINE
All about Romance, http://www.likesbooks.com/ (September 15, 2001), review of Thirtynothing.
Booksellers New Zealand, http://booksellersnz.wordpress.com/ (June 24, 2015), Lynn McAnulty-Street, review of The Girls: A Novel.
Emma Lee-Potter, http://www.emmaleepotter.com/ (August 22, 2014), Emma Lee-Potter, review of The Third Wife.
Girl Posse, http://www.girlposse.com/ (January 30, 2007), “The Fifteen Question E-Mail Interview with Lisa Jewell.”
Lisa Jewell Home Page, http://www.lisa-jewell.co.uk (March 10, 2016).
Lola Jaye website, http://lolajaye.com/ (February 11, 2009), interview with Jewell.
Novelicious, http://www.novelicious.com/ (June 30, 2014), Susan Lobban, review of The Third Wife.
Oklahoman Online, http://newsok.com/ (October 10, 2015), Betty Lytle, review of The Third Wife.
Penguin website, http://www.penguin.co.uk/ (February 11, 2009), profile of Jewell.
Simon & Schuster website, http://books.simonandschuster.com/ (December 2, 2014), synopsis of The House We Grew Up In.
Telegraph Online (London, England), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (August 8, 2005), Alex Clark, “Lisa Jewell.”
Trashionista, http://www.trashionista.com/ (March 5, 2007), review of Vince & Joy; (March 5, 2007), reviews of Ralph’s Party and A Friend of the Family.
What Is That Book About, http://www.whatisthatbookabout.com/ (July 22, 2014), Michelle Bowles, interview with Lisa Jewell.
Lisa Jewell
UK flag (b.1968)
Lisa Jewell was born on 19th July 1968 in Middlesex Hospital in London's West End. Her father Anthony is a Textile Agent and her mother Kay is a secretary. She has two younger sisters, Sacha and Tanya. She was brought up in a strange part of North London called Totteridge, known to some as the Beverly Hills of London, where her neighbours included such luminaries as Micky Most, Des O'Connor and Patti Boulay.
Lisa now lives in Swiss Cottage with her husband and daughter.
Awards: Nibbies (2024) see all
Genres: Mystery, Romance, General Fiction, Historical
New and upcoming books
July 2024
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Breaking the Dark
(Marvel Crime, book 1)
Series
Ralph's Party
1. Ralph's Party (1999)
2. After the Party (2010)
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Family Upstairs
1. The Family Upstairs (2019)
2. The Family Remains (2022)
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Marvel Crime
1. Breaking the Dark (2024)
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Novels
Thirtynothing (2000)
One-hit Wonder (2001)
A Friend of the Family (2003)
Vince and Joy (2005)
Roommates Wanted (2007)
aka 31 Dream Street
The Truth About Melody Browne (2009)
The Making of Us (2011)
Before I Met You (2012)
The House We Grew Up In (2013)
The Third Wife (2014)
The Girls in the Garden (2015)
aka The Girls
I Found You (2016)
Then She Was Gone (2017)
Watching You (2018)
Invisible Girl (2020)
The Night She Disappeared (2021)
None of this is True (2023)
Lisa Jewell is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of nineteen novels, including The Family Upstairs and Then She Was Gone, as well as Invisible Girl and Watching You. Her novels have sold over 10 million copies internationally, and her work has also been translated into twenty-nine languages. Connect with her on Twitter @LisaJewellUK, on Instagram @LisaJewellUK, and on Facebook @LisaJewellOfficial.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lisa Jewell
Jewell in 2018
Jewell in 2018
Born 19 July 1968 (age 55)
London, England
Language English
Genre Popular Fiction
Children 2
Lisa Jewell (born 19 July 1968) is a British author of popular fiction. Her books include Ralph's Party, Thirtynothing, After The Party (a sequel to Ralph's Party),[1] Then She Was Gone, The Family Upstairs, Invisible Girl and The Night She Disappeared.[2] Her latest book None of This Is True was published in July 2023. [3]
Life
Jewell was born in London and educated at St. Michael's Catholic Grammar School in Finchley, north London, leaving school after one day in the sixth form to do an art foundation course at Barnet College followed by a diploma in fashion illustration at Epsom School of Art & Design.
She worked in fashion retail for several years, namely Warehouse and Thomas Pink.[4]
After being made redundant, Jewell accepted her friend Yasmin Boland's challenge, to write three chapters of a novel in exchange for dinner at her favourite restaurant. Those three chapters eventually developed into Jewell's debut novel Ralph's Party, which became the UK's bestselling debut novel in 1999.[5][6]
In 2008 she was awarded the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance for her novel 31 Dream Street.[7]
She currently lives in Swiss Cottage, London, with her husband Jascha, and daughters Amelie Mae (born 2003) and Evie Scarlett (born 2007).[4]
Bibliography
Novels
Ralph's Party (1999)
Thirtynothing (2000)
One Hit Wonder (2001)
A Friend of the Family (2004)
Vince and Joy (2005)
31 Dream Street (2007)
Roommates Wanted (2008) – alternative title for 31 Dream Street
The Truth About Melody Browne (2009)
After The Party (2010)[8]
The Making of Us (2011)[2]
Before I Met You (2012)[9]
The House We Grew Up In (2013)
The Third Wife (2014)
The Girls (aka The Girls in the Garden) (2015)
I Found You (2016)
Then She Was Gone (2017)
Watching You (2018)
The Family Upstairs (2019)
Invisible Girl (2020)
The Night She Disappeared (2021)
The Family Remains (2022)
None of This is True (2023)
LISA JEWELL: HOW I ACCIDENTALLY WROTE A DETECTIVE INTO MY PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER
An author who had quite deliberately kept detectives and police out of her novels finally lets one in.
AUGUST 11, 2022 BY LISA JEWELL
VIA ATRIA
Between the ages of twelve and thirteen I read the entire Agatha Christie oeuvre in under a year. They were like crack for me, my first addiction, I couldn’t get enough of them. I read four a week, under the bedcovers, by torchlight. Then I discovered indie music and that became my next obsession and I forgot about reading books entirely.
I rediscovered reading in my early twenties when I read widely and eclectically, but oddly, given my earlier predilection for Agatha Christie’s detective novels, one thing I did not read was crime. I did not read Raymond Chandler, PD James, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Cornell, Patricia Highsmith or Elmore Leonard. I did not read Lee Child, Val McDermid or Ian Rankin. I was not familiar with Inspector Morse, Jack Reacher, John Rebus, Adam Dalgleish nor Vic Warshawski. The only literary detective I have read over the years, and purely by accidental dint of the fact that I was reading the author’s literary novels before she moved across to her detective series, was Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie.
There is a certain commitment involved in becoming loyal to a literary detective or investigator, a certain element of fandom that makes you want to keep returning to the world of a man or woman whose foibles, tics, traumas, habits and techniques you have become familiar with over a thousand or more pages. It’s not a commitment that I have wanted to make and I am aware that as a crime writer, this a something of a failing.
A Facebook Book Group of which I am a member had long been extolling the virtues of MW Craven’s Washington Poe detective series and to try to rectify my lack of experience of reading detective novels, I decided that I would order the whole series and read it one fell swoop. That was two years again and to this day the series sits unread on my reading pile, mentally filed away in my ‘books I intend to read when I retire and all I do all day is read’ folder while I return to my teetering pile of standalones.
My taste in fiction is tilted more towards psychological thrillers, where all the drama, all the tension, all the terror is filtered through criminal and victim, where the criminal may not be murderer but a stalker or an abuser, where the victim may not be dead body, but a living breathing human being who feels under threat in some way, where there is no third party in charge and the players have to resolve the stories by themselves.
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
Not only have I failed to read any detective novels since I was thirteen, but in my own writing I have assiduously avoided creating any sort of official police or private detectives. This isn’t because of any personal vendetta against detectives, but simply because I have been too lazy to read the book I bought myself when I started writing crime about ten years ago called The Crime Writers’ Guide to Police Practice and Procedure, which is still sitting on my bookshelves covered in a fine layer of dust. I did read the first page and then stopped. Too much to learn! Too difficult! I decided that it would be easier simply to write crime without detectives, and consequently most of my crime novels use civilian characters to solve the crimes whilst the police bumble around vaguely in the background, being too slow, too underfunded, or too late to the scene to do anything effective.
But in my latest book, The Family Remains, something strange happened. He came from nowhere, my first detective. DC Samuel Owusu was meant to appear fleetingly in the prologue, alongside his colleague DI Saffron Brown. They were meant to find some bones, identify the bones and then disappear through a back door somewhere leaving my characters to do the rest of the work. But Samuel just sort of stuck around and demanded that I work alongside him as he cracked the case.
I still had no knowledge of police procedure and no desire to acquire any, so I wrote him with a very light touch, using the bare basics that I have gleaned over a lifetime of watching police dramas, avoiding anything that might require more depth. I focused down deep into his brain and stayed there. He was too busy thinking about clues and visual tics and tells to spend any time filling in paperwork or having acronym packed conversations with colleagues. He was too in-the-moment for a complicated back story or bad habits. He was too pure for professional skulduggery, rule breaking or inappropriateness. I boiled him down to the purest essence of detective. A brain on legs. A genial sweetheart with a laser eye for detail and the patience of a saint. I have no idea if any such detective exists anywhere in the world, I just know that if I ever needed someone to crack a case on my behalf, I would love it to be a real-life Samuel Owusu. And yes, I might bring him back for round two. And who knows after that, maybe a series. But first I really do need to get around to reading somebody else’s.
LISA JEWELL ON CRAFT, INSPIRATION, AND WHY SHE NEEDED TO WRITE A BOARDING SCHOOL MURDER MYSTERY
More than twenty years later, Jewell still resists making any firm plans for her novels.
SEPTEMBER 7, 2021 BY DANEET STEFFENS
Over the course of her more than 20-year career—her debut novel, Ralph’s Party, came out in 1999—Lisa Jewell famously transitioned from rom-coms to psychological thrillers. But what really marks her as a writer is her non-plotting, open-ended approach: she’s a perpetual writer-explorer, taking readers along for hair-raising, heart-stopping rides. Her latest novel, The Night She Disappeared, begins with the mysterious vanishing of a young couple, Tallulah and Zach, after a gathering at the home of Scarlett, a local rich girl. Tallulah’s mother, Kim, does what she can to keep the police case active, but the suspense-laden fireworks really kick off when, a year later, new headmaster Shaun arrives at a nearby boarding school along with his girlfriend, Sophie.
Lisa and I spoke via Skype on a day when my region of the US was suffering from drought, and her home city of London was experiencing what she termed “biblical downpours.” Our conversation has been condensed and edited.
Daneet Steffens: You usually have a specific starting point with your books, a person or a place that fires your imagination. Was there a particular inspiration for The Night She Disappeared?
Lisa Jewell: This one was definitely a setting. Somebody said the words “boarding school”—they were talking about a book they’d written earlier on in their career that was set in a boarding school. And I had this moment of “I’ve never written a book set in a boarding school! I want to write a book set in a boarding school! I want to do a murder mystery set in a boarding school!” And then my mind started wheeling off, thinking, “Yeah, something where an outsider comes into this very elite privileged bubble and something terrible befalls them at the hands of this group of very entitled people.” So that was the starting point. But I didn’t stick with that setting: as the characters came to life and as the story jumped off the page, I found myself getting further and further out of the environs of the school—into the village and outside the village and even across into the town—so it became much more of a sprawling kind of location piece. But the original inspiration was a boarding school, and it was based on a school I’d driven past in the countryside six years ago and thought, “Wow, imagine going to boarding school in this beautiful village.”
DS: When I read the book, I thought maybe the jumping-off point was a house that inspired Dark Place, Scarlett’s home. That building takes on such a powerful and imposing character of its own.
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LJ: I spent so much time envisaging the boarding school; I had this strong visual image of this handsome, amazing, historical building. So it was bit of a shock to me when I suddenly found myself creating another much more beautiful, much more interesting, much more historical, much more aspirational fantasy kind of building, which completely overshadowed my beautiful boarding school. But that building, Dark Place, was entirely made up: I loved the idea of this house that had been there in one form or another since the 1600s, had all this history, yet was still suitable for the lifestyle of a very upper-middle-class modern family. I wanted to understand this house and how it came to be, so I wrote this scene where Kim and her son, Ryan, are walking towards the house and I had Ryan googling the house which immediately gave me the excuse to write its history. I loved that in the fictional history of this house, this couple came in in the 1700s and outraged all the villagers by adding a modern extension of early Georgian architecture that nobody had ever seen before; they were the equivalent of a pair of hipsters coming from the city and modernizing an old building today.
DS: There’s an ever-present sense of menace and tension in the book, not just related to mysterious disappearances or brooding buildings, but because there are multiple relationships that include controlling partners as well as controlling parents. Was that aspect partly drawn from your experience?
LJ: Certainly the coercive relationship that’s growing between Tallulah and Zach is. When I write, I haven’t really made any decisions until I’m in the process of writing the words on the page. Originally, Tallulah was going to be a single mother with an ex-boyfriend in the background, but Zach kept forcing himself onto the page. Eventually I thought, “Okay, he clearly needs to be in the story for whatever reason, so it isn’t just going to be Tallulah who goes missing.” And once he was there I thought, “Well, I need to do something with him.” And it just seemed natural to me: I had been in a marriage where I was coercively controlled by my husband so I have lived that experience and it is something that I keep coming back to—I’m doing it again in the book that I’m writing at the moment, the sequel to The Family Upstairs. I don’t think it’s something you can revisit too often: I think it’s endlessly fascinating that intelligent, strong, independent women allow themselves time after time after time to be dragged down into these awful relationships; the psychology behind it is endlessly fascinating. So when I found that creeping into Zach and Tallulah’s relationship, I just let it do its thing. I had no idea when I started whether he was going to hit her, whether he was going to become physically abusive—I didn’t know. I just thought, “Well, let’s just see how they get on and how far he pushes it.”
DS: Tallulah’s really well rendered, clearly and with empathy, this young mother who is not quite mature herself yet. Is she based on a specific person?
LJ: Not really. As I get further into my career, I’m aware that I’m revisiting things that I’ve visited before. I’ve done missing teenage girls before, so I wanted to give this a different dimension. I’d never done a teenage mother, so I decided to give Tallulah a baby and see what that did to the story arc and her character development. I really enjoyed writing about her love for her baby, how she thinks about him when she’s doing things because she knows she should be bettering herself and giving herself all the chances in the world to succeed and be the person that she should be. That sometimes means that she’s not with her son at that moment, but he’s always in her heart and in her mind, whatever she’s doing.
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Scarlett, on the other hand, always looked in my head like a young Stella Tennant when she had short hair and looked slightly edgy and punky. It wasn’t until I got quite a long way into writing Scarlett that I realized that I’d based her character on a girl that my daughter was at school with. This girl wasn’t controlling in any sort of obvious way, she didn’t boss people around or make people follow her around, they just chose to. I’d been writing Scarlett this whole time with this girl in the back of my mind without even realizing it.
DS: Sophie writes mysteries featuring a pair of detectives: “When she’s writing, her brain comes up with mysteries and Susie and Tiger have to solve them for her….” Is that how it works for you? Is Sophie solving the mystery for you?
LJ: Yes! Somebody has to be my detective in every novel because I don’t do police procedurals. I always have to find the character who’s going to be the one and interestingly, with Sophie, I started writing it differently. This book was going to be the point of view of Kim, Tallulah, and Shaun, but I wrote his chapter and thought, “I’m not interested in you, you’re going to be too busy running this school. No, your girlfriend—she’s the one.” I didn’t know who she was at this point—I just knew he had a girlfriend called Sophie—but I worked out that she was younger than him and that she had left London to be with him. But then I thought, “Um, what’s your job? What is it you do so that you’re able to just up sticks and leave London and work from a desk from a cottage in the middle of the countryside?” I went through all these ideas, start-ups and other online options, and then I thought, “Hold on, hold on—she could be a novelist!” And then it seemed obvious that if she was going to be my mystery solver that she should be a detective novelist.
DS: You’ve often talked about your approach to writing—no plotting, no Post-its; you let the characters show you their way; and you carve out time for social media. You’ve conquered the business of being a bestselling writer. Where does the joy of writing come into it?
LJ: Well, the writing part is three hours a day; being a writer is everything else. Talking to you is being a writer; the hour I spent on Instagram this morning replying to readers’ messages is being a writer; reading books that my contemporaries have written so that I can quote for them for their promotions is being a writer. I went for a meeting at my editor’s house the other day and we had cake and tea and talked, and that was being a writer. Being a writer is, as it has always been for me, absolutely my perfect lifestyle, including the publication process. I love that whole cycle: delivery, editing, publication, publicity.
But writing is something that I’ve only just in the last few books started to get any pleasure out of, and that is purely because I’ve got better at it. I’ve made so many mistakes, learned from those mistakes, and I can smell those mistakes coming a mile off now: I can smell when I’m about to write myself into a corner or go off on the wrong tangent; I can tell when I’m about to do something that means I’m going to have to delete 10,000 words at some point. And I just stop and I refocus, pull myself back and think, “Right. What is this actually about? Remember which direction you’re trying to head in with this.” Which means that I spend a lot less time panicking and being chaotic and thinking, “This isn’t working—this isn’t working! What a disaster!” and much more time sitting at my computer, putting things on the screen that I feel pretty certain that, even if I don’t know what they’re doing there at that moment in time, will make their function and purpose known at some point. Then it’s all just a big jigsaw puzzle that I’m putting together day by day, direct from my head onto the screen, and it’s actually fun. And I often feel that I might be enjoying the writing of the mystery as much as the reader is enjoying the reading of the mystery because we’re kind of in a similar zone, a similar space to each other, because I don’t plan anything. I do think that I’m learning my craft and I’m getting better at it, and that’s really nice. And you’d like to think that after 22 years you would be better at it, wouldn’t you?
Lisa Jewell Discusses Her Latest Thriller, ‘None of This Is True’
The “New York Times” best-selling novelist talks to Shondaland about her 21st novel, her writing process, and how she generates ideas.
BY SANDRA EBEJERPUBLISHED: AUG 9, 2023
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Few New York Times best-selling novelists can say their career was launched with a bet, a handshake, and the promise of a good meal. And yet, that’s precisely how Lisa Jewell came to write her 1999 debut novel, Ralph’s Party.
At the age of 26, the then-secretary had a secret desire to write a book but thought she would have to wait until later in life. “It’s something I thought I would do once I had more life experience,” Jewell tells Shondaland. “I didn’t think young women like me wrote novels.” After reading Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity — a book she describes as “so fresh and so young” — she wondered if she actually might be able to write a book of her own.
“I found myself having this conversation with [a friend], Yasmin, where I embarrassedly told her that I was thinking I’d like to write a novel. She said, ‘I’ve had so many people tell me they want to write a novel. Just do it. Don’t say you’re going to do it; just do it. In fact, write three chapters. If you do that, I’ll take you out for dinner to your favorite restaurant.’ We shook hands, I wrote three chapters, and she took me out to my favorite restaurant. But she also made me send those three chapters out to a load of literary agents, and she made me keep writing by demanding more and more chapters. So, it didn’t just end with the bet. She was there for the full duration of that first novel.”
Today, Jewell is the author of 21 novels, including her latest, None of This Is True. A psychological thriller, it tells the story of Londoners Alix and Josie, “birthday twins” who were born on the same day at the same hospital but who don’t meet until they happen to be at the same restaurant celebrating their 45th birthday. Soon, Alix, a popular podcast host, is bumping into unassuming Josie nearly everywhere she goes. At Josie’s suggestion, Alix begins a new podcast about Josie’s life. Dark secrets are unveiled, and the women’s lives become intertwined in very dangerous ways.
Jewell recently spoke with Shondaland about the premise for the new novel, her approach to writing, and her advice to aspiring novelists.
SANDRA EBEJER: Congratulations on the new book! After so many years of writing, do you still find it as exciting when a new book is going out into the world?
LISA JEWELL: Every single time. I think that’s because every time I deliver a book, and my publishing team gets behind it, and it starts going out to NetGalley and what have you, I’ve already got a sense that people are going to like the book. If I delivered a book that nobody was behind and the early reviews were a bit meh, I might not be quite as excited about it. But when you’ve got so much enthusiasm behind it, as I’ve had with my last few publications, it’s just infectious.
SE: Where did the idea for None of This Is True come from?
LJ: I rarely think in terms of big themes. I’m usually very granular about the little, tiny things I want to write about, and then I have to find a way to knit them all together. But I did have quite a strong sense with this book that I wanted to write a stalker novel because I’ve never written about a stalker. It isn’t quite a stalker novel, but that was the initial premise. And then I thought an interesting dynamic would be to introduce two characters who discovered that they’re birthday twins — they’re born on the same day in the same place — and the contrast between the way their lives have panned out. And then other little things fed into it. Like, I saw this guy through a window in an apartment when I was walking the dog many months ago. He was just sitting there in his apartment and staring at his laptop, just a nondescript-looking guy. And that [became Josie’s husband] Walter. I was obsessed with this guy. I wanted to know what was going on in the apartment behind him. I had this strong sense that there was a locked door somewhere in his apartment, and something going on behind it that was a dark secret. So, that was the propelling factor that got me into where I needed to be to decide who these birthday twins were going to be and what the dynamic was going to be between them.
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lisa jewell
ANDREW WHITTON
Lisa Jewell is pictured in a headshot.
SE: In the book’s acknowledgments, you write that your sister suggested a character, a teen girl who’s a gaming addict, which helped kick off the story in your mind. Do you always start your novels with a small idea or a character and then build out from there?
LJ: Yeah. With this one, it was quite unusual in that I knew what dynamic I wanted to create before I even knew who my characters were going to be, and then I found the characters that fitted into those places. But usually, it is literally a person. Quite often a person I’ve just seen fleetingly on the street or through a window. They get inside my head, and I’m convinced they’ve got a story to share with me, and I need to start writing around them to find out what it is, what their secrets are, what’s happened to them, or what’s about to happen to them. So yes, it is usually a person. Sometimes it’s even a house. Sometimes I’m convinced a house is holding secrets, a bit like Walter and Josie’s flat [in None of This Is True]. I just get this sense that there’s a secret somewhere, and I need to write about the house or the person to find out what it is.
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SE: That idea of secrets is a huge theme in this book and has been in your other books as well. Is that something you intentionally write about, or does it just find its way into your work?
LJ: I had no idea when I started writing the book what Josie was going to unveil. I didn’t know what her story was going to be. I just knew that I was going to have to come to my computer every day and write a chapter or write 1,000 words, and that was going to move the plot along, and that was going to help me find out more about what it was that Josie really wanted to talk to Alix about. Because the initial moment of connection is Josie basically saying to Alix, “I need to talk to you about my life.” I didn’t know what Josie’s life was. I just knew she had this husband, a bit older than her, sitting by the window staring at his laptop, and a kid in a room gaming. Some people could read the ending to be ambiguous or open; a lot of people have read it as I intended it to be — not ambiguous or open — which is Josie finally confronting the truth in her head of what actually happened. But I didn’t work out until a long time after I’d written the book precisely what Josie was hiding, and what was true and what wasn’t. And then to realize, weeks after writing the book, that it was all in there. I put it all in there without really knowing what it was while I was writing it.
SE: This book has multiple layers of storytelling. There’s the narrative, but then there’s also the podcast that Josie and Alix do, and interspersed throughout the book are scenes from a Netflix show based on the podcast. Why did you decide to write the story in that way?
LJ: It was very much a retroactive decision on my part. I love this sort of book that’s like a slow, creeping dread [with] tiny moments of discomfort. It was all really quiet and took place in these very quiet locations, in Josie’s little flat and Alix’s little recording studio. There wasn’t much going on. And I thought, “As much as I’m really enjoying this, I feel like my reader might need more of an investment to stick with this, to realize that there’s a lot of jeopardy in play here, that the characters are in peril, that really shocking, dramatic things are going to happen.” I love watching those crazy Netflix documentaries. I love them with a passion. The weirder, the better. I [imagined] a character walking into an empty studio and a shabby velvet sofa in the middle of the floor and the producer saying, “So, tell me about your memories of Josie.” I could just picture it. And I thought, “Okay, let’s start there, and then we can really introduce the reader to the sense of what this is all building up to.”
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SE: Do you know when you sit down to write where the story is going at all? Or what the ending is going to be?
LJ: No, not even slightly. I got to the end of the book, and I wrote, I think, three other epilogues. None of them did the trick because at that point I still didn’t really understand what happened. I didn’t really understand what Josie was lying about and what was true and what wasn’t. I was as much in the dark as a reader. And it was literally as I was writing those last few paragraphs, when her mind starts wheeling backwards in time and she’s remembering what happened on that particular night, I suddenly saw it. I thought, “Oh, my God, of course! It totally makes sense. Of course, it wasn’t x; it was y.” And I realized when I looked back into the narrative that all those moments were already there. I’d already put all these moments in that made sense of what Josie reveals in the last few paragraphs of the book. So, that was absolutely nothing that I had in mind or planned or thought about. I was kind of desperate at that time. I was thinking, “I’m not going to find the ending to this book. I’m not finding the ending to this book.” And then it found me. It was like a miracle.
SE: Does that happen frequently, where you’re stuck and then something suddenly comes to you that makes it all fit?
LJ: Yeah, quite often. The weird thing is, it’s often in there already. I don’t have to go back and plant it in there. It was there all along. I think a lot of that is because I write without a plan, it means I leave my characters and the situations I put them in [with] a lot of leeway. Because in my head, I’m thinking, “Well, I’m not sure about this character yet. They could be the villain. I don’t know. So, let’s leave them looking a bit shady. Let’s not answer too many questions about why they did x, y, and zed. Let’s just leave it like that, and I can come back to it later.” And when you write characters and situations like that, you’re giving yourself all these little gifts that you can use later on in the narrative to make sense of everything because you haven’t pinned everything down too firmly.
SE: I had a hard time letting go of these characters, which to me is a sign of a great book. Do you feel that way when you write a novel? Is it hard for you to let go? Or are you just done?
LJ: I’m totally done. Even back in the days when I was writing romantic comedies, I was emotionally invested with these characters, their relationships, and their day-to-day lives, and who they were on a level that had nothing to do with trauma and drama and murder and crime. I was writing some really adorable characters back then. And no, I never felt a whisker of regret or anything about saying goodbye to them. I just love writing new books. I love starting new books. Because as most writers would say, your next book starts coming to you while you’re writing the one you’re writing. So, there’s a sense that you’ve got a lot of new pastures to explore, and you just can’t wait to get to them.
None of This Is True: A Novel
None of This Is True: A Novel
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SE: If you could go back to the start of your writing career, knowing what you know now, would you do anything differently?
LJ: No! I couldn’t because it would be like that butterfly effect thing. When I think about where I am now, this is perfect for me. I mean, [None of This Is True] could be a big breakout novel, in terms of the big novel, but equally, it might not be. But I know it’s going to sell enough copies, and it’s going to make readers really happy, and it’s going to be out there, and it’s gonna be buzzy and talked about. I’m going to go on tour and talk about the book, and it’s all just healthy and alive. There’s electricity going through it. I’m 55 in two days. This is quite a time in my life to be experiencing this, still picking up new readers, still — I hate to use the word, but in the parlance of my children — relevant. To have the career I’ve had, to have always written a book I wanted to write, [to have] never felt that I’ve been railroaded into writing things to order, and to still be here and writing books that people get excited about, it’s just fantastic. So no, I wouldn’t change any of it.
SE: Do you have any advice for aspiring novelists?
LJ: Honestly, I think the biggest enemy that I can see of people who’ve tried to start writing novels is overthinking. The beauty of a novel is it’s a lump of clay; you can just squish it up and start again. You can rework it; you can change it. That first chapter means nothing, because the first chapter often won’t be the first chapter. And it doesn’t matter what anybody else is writing. Don’t look at the market. Don’t worry about what you think publishers are looking for. You’ve just got to throw it on the page. Don’t think about anything else. Your story’s in there. Your people are in there. Your places are in there. Your words are in there. Just get them down on the page. Keep working at it until it’s really good, and then worry about the rest of it.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Author Lisa Jewell Reveals the Secrets to Her Success
The New York Times bestselling novelist admits she does virtually no planning before she writes.
Jackie Rupp
Oct 13, 2021
Lisa Jewell is a New York Times bestselling author of 19 novels, including The Family Upstairs, And Then She Was Gone, Invisible Girl, and Watching You. Her books have sold over 5 million copies internationally, and her work has been translated into 28 languages.
But that is a far cry from where she was in 1995, when she was a 20-something, down-on-her-luck unemployed secretary with just distant dreams of becoming a writer. “Like so many people do, I had this vision that, one day, I'd like to write a novel, but in my head it was something I would do when I was middle-aged," Jewell said during the Celebrations Book Club by Cheryl's Cookies virtual event. "I thought only middle-aged women wrote novels, not young women like me, particularly not ones that are secretaries. I thought I'd have to go off and live this grand life first before I'd be allowed to do that."
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Evolution as a novelist
Jewell had just turned 27, was recently fired from her job, and was away for a getaway. After a night out, her friend dared her to act on her aspiration to become a writer, promising Jewell dinner at her favorite restaurant if she was able to get three chapters down on paper. Jewell not only met the challenge but sent what she had written to literary agencies. That turned out to be the start of her first novel, Ralph's Party, which would go on to become the bestselling debut novel in the United Kingdom in 1999.
Jewell's first novels were romantic comedies, but as she moved into her 30s, got married, became a mother, and lost her own mother, her priorities shifted. She no longer had the same interest in writing about young roommates living the single life, so she moved into the suspense genre.
Who wouldnt love this?
Her latest work
The Night She Disappeared follows her psychological suspense style. Set in a lush English village, the story revolves around Zach and Tallulah, teenage parents with a less than ideal relationship. After a rare night out together, the couple disappears and Tallulah's mother is left to pick up the pieces. She is tasked with raising her infant grandson alone, all while grieving for her missing daughter and trying to solve the mystery of her disappearance. A tangled web of personalities emerges from the incident, including Sophie, a mystery writer who, by chance, uncovers clues regarding the couple's whereabouts through an ominous “Dig Here" sign.
When host Claudia Copquin asked her how she came up with this storyline, Jewell said that she doesn't start her writing knowing where the story is going to go. Instead, she thinks of the things she's “keen" to write about. In the case of The Night She Disappeared, those elements were three things: a boarding school setting, the mysterious “Dig Here" sign, and exploring the character of a teenage mother.
“I'm at the point in my career where...finding new things to write about is always quite challenging," Jewell said.
Jewell said very little of her writing is autobiographical. She did admit, however, to feeling a connection with Tallulah, who finds herself in an increasingly controlling relationship with Zach and few places to turn for escape. “I, myself, was in a very young marriage in my early 20s in which I was coercively controlled by my husband."
She empathizes with Tallulah's hesitancy to share her concerns with even her mother, to whom she is extremely close. “You don't want anyone to know, and the reason why you don't want anyone to know is because if you tell anyone that cares about you and loves you, they're going to try and get involved," she said. "They're going to try to fix things, and that makes everything worse."
A peek into the creative process
Creative Project
Lisa Jewell and her dog, Willow
Interestingly, Jewell herself usually does not know how her stories will end. She simply starts writing and follows clues as the words reveal them to her. “I come to the page with nothing. I've done no research. I've barely actually thought about what it is I'm about to start doing. I'm not a planner," Jewell said. "I'd say 90% of what the reader reads on the page happens while I'm sitting with my fingers on the keyboard. Ten percent happens when I'm walking the dog or in the shower thinking."
This can leave much of the resolution of her stories until the last minute, which Jewell admits can be quite chaotic. So far, though, this approach has worked for her — and with seven of her books currently optioned to be adapted for the screen, it certainly is working for audiences.
Attendees — all of whom received a free Cheryl's Cookies sampler for registering for the event — were curious to learn more about Jewell's creative process during the question-and-answer portion of the discussion. They asked whether Jewell would want to solve a mystery in real life (definitely yes), what her writing routine is (she's an atypical afternoon writer, who, during the pandemic, had to get an office away from home to better focus), and whether she has any strategies for writer's block.
For this last question, Jewell had some advice that could easily apply to any daunting task: Just do it. “I manage this by not caring about whether what I write is good. I'm much more fixated on getting to 1,000 words [a day]; that becomes my obsession.
"So, I always say, 'Just write anything. Don't overthink it.'"
Q&A with Lisa Jewell
June 6, 2016 | By MM Finck | 1 Reply
We, here at WomenWritersWomen[s]Books, are in love with Lisa Jewell.
How can you not fall for a woman whose story of success starts with getting laid off from her secretarial job, followed by drinking and eating her sorrows away with friends, includes an actual wager, and ends like a fairytale? [Insert from Lisa – “So – there you have it. Dreams can come true. And it’s all thanks to a drunken conversation with a pushy friend at four in the morning in Gozo! Life is a funny thing.” )
How can you not fall for a woman who seems to hold pay-it-forward as a personal tenet? The web is full of her advice and wisdom – both print interviews and personal videos. This, from the one of the most popular authors writing in the UK today.
Lisa Jewell’s first book, the result of that wine-soaked wager, Ralph’s Party, became the UK’s bestselling debut in 1999. In 2008, she was awarded the Melissa Nathan Award For Comedy Romance for her novel 31 Dream Street. She has written numerous other bestselling novels in the commercial and upmarket women’s fiction genre including: Before I Met You, The House I Grew Up In, and, most recently, THE GIRLS (Released as THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN in the US in June 2016).
We are so pleased to welcome Lisa to WomenWritersWomen[‘s]Books.
Let’s start from the beginning, your beginning.
75656043Where did you grow up? How does it compare to where you are raising your own family?
I grew up in north London, in a small cottage in a semi-rural area at the very furthest end of the tube line, zone 6, virtually not in London at all. I dreamed of living in zone 1. I now live in zone 2. I love it; it’s urban and well connected, I can hear sirens at night and I’m in the centre of town in twenty minutes. My children are being brought up in the heart of the city and I’m so jealous of them! I’m aiming for a penthouse in zone 1 once the children have left home.
What were you like as a kid? A teen?
As a kid I was quiet, sweet-natured, excruciatingly shy, a bookworm and very imaginative. As a tween I was horribly self conscious, self-loathing and borderline depressed. But that phase didn’t last long and as a teen I was very gregarious, obsessed with indie music and old overcoats and backcombing. I had boyfriends who were much older than me but they didn’t take advantage, and I was a pretty good girl, no drugs, no sex, just lots of rock and roll. My biggest flaw as a teen was having no particular desire to succeed at anything.
Secret talent?
Untangling tangled things. Oh, and I can draw quite well.
Best meal you prepare?
A Thai banquet; I think my friends would agree. Usually about three or four dishes. And all so spicy that everyone goes a bit mad and texts me about their toilet experiences the next day.
What is your preference between reading on paper or digitally and why?
I am one hundred percent in the paper camp. My house is virtually fifty percent books. I adore them. All the work that goes into making them look good and feel good, making them pick-up-able and desirable, it’s not for nothing, and you lose all that joy with an e book reader. I love turning pages, and more than that, I love closing a book when it’s finished and putting it on my shelf and saying goodbye to it, properly.
What book are you reading right now? Which books are at the top of your TBR pile?
I’m reading Maggie O’Farrell’s latest, called This Must Be The Place. I’m a huge fan of hers but didn’t adore her last book, Instructions On A Heatwave, but this – my God, this – it is completely in another league to anything she’s written before. It reads like a great American novel. It’s a big book, but I am racing through it, completely swept away by the characters and her prose. Next on the pile is A History Of Loneliness by John Boyne, bought on the back of a reading group going nuts about it on Facebook. Then I intend to tackle A Little Life, as soon as I can conquer my terror of the sheer size of it.
What author(s) are we not reading that we should be?
Tamar Cohen. Everything she’s written is amazing, from crime to domestic noir. I would start with her first, The Mistress’s Revenge, and work your way up from there.
You publish about a book every eighteen months. What is your schedule when you are writing?
I actually publish a book every year! My schedule is very flexible and forgiving. Because I write in cafés and coffee shops, I can always find the time to write even if I have other plans for the day, eg; a school performance or a meeting with my publishers. I spend my early mornings being a mum and then at 10am, when all is quiet, I take my laptop out to a local coffee shop and I stay there until I have written 1000 words. I don’t care what kind of words they are, as long as they are on the page by the time I leave.
It usually takes about two and a half hours but can sometimes take less, sometimes more. Then I get home, have lunch and spend a couple of hours doing emails, social media and things like this Q&A. Then at 3:20, I turn back into a mum and head off to collect my youngest from school. I don’t work after that, and I don’t work at weekends or in school holidays. In fact, my children could easily go their whole lives without actually realising what I do for a living!
What characteristics do you need to know about your protagonist before you feel her story is ready to be written?
Each character is different. Some I feel I know intimately before I start writing their story and then it’s just a matter of showing them to the reader. Others start as an outline, which I fill in as I go, getting to know the character as the reader gets to know them. I love it when I find myself thinking things like; no, that won’t work, X character wouldn’t do that/say that/think that. I also love little discoveries like the first time you describe a character naked and you realise that they have a freckled back. Or a small tattoo. You didn’t know it was there yourself until you described it. But I don’t have a checklist. It’s much more nebulous than that.
Regarding your process – To what degree do you plan your books before you write them? You know your character and your ending in advance. What else?
I am not a planner, not even slightly. I tend to spend a while ‘testing’ ideas inside my head. I let them grow branches and roots and sprouts in there and if they stop growing I move onto another idea. As soon as an idea has grown enough roots and sprouts and branches that it has become too big to keep in my head any longer, I start writing. I start with chapter one and I keep going. I don’t go back. Every morning I read the 1000 words I wrote the previous day, and then I crack my knuckles (metaphorically; I don’t know how to crack my knuckles) and write another 1000 words.
In theory, one hundred days later I should have a full length novel and it does tend to work out like that most of the time. Sometimes though it all goes horribly wrong. I have abandoned books 30, 40, 50 thousand words in and started again or written something else instead. But to me, that’s not a failure, it’s just part of the process. I’d rather give up on something than keep banging away at a draft that I can’t get to work.
How are you able to write only one draft? Do you revise as you go?
I don’t tend to revise as I go. If I’m sending the book to someone during the process – typically my editor at the halfway point – then I’ll read it through from the beginning and make any changes that jump out at me. But nothing major. And I’ll tweak the previous day’s output if I feel it needs it. But otherwise I just go, go, go. I’ll always hit rocks in the road, of course, and spend a few days wondering how the hell I’m going to move things on or work out the wrinkles. But I always find a way and because I write so fast and regularly I make sure I don’t spend too long over-thinking things.
Writers are told that their main characters need to be flawed and that most commercial readers appreciate them also being somewhat likeable. On the surface, this is at odds and makes some writers nervous: ‘My protagonist is selfish. I’m afraid the readers won’t want to keep reading through to her evolving into a better person.” What thoughts do you have on this? What protagonist flaws have you had success with?
One example I can think of is a character in my latest, as yet unpublished book. She’s very hard, very cold, shows very little human compassion. But in the final scene we see her turning to wipe away a tear and then kissing the hand of the baby on her lap. I wanted the reader to have their preconceptions about her confounded at the very last turn of the page, to be reminded that everyone has some goodness in them however hard their shell. But I’m not sure it’s a one-size-fits-all issue. All my characters have flaws and some readers love them for their flaws and other readers dislike a book because they couldn’t move beyond the flaws. So, there’s no one winning formula here.
All I know is that everyone I know and love in this world is good and bad in varying measures, and I couldn’t write a character who didn’t embody all those shades of light and dark. I’m not interested in writing one dimensional goodies and baddies. I have a personal preference for writing ‘bad’ characters because I really enjoy the challenge of throwing some light on them and letting the reader see right inside to the soft, scared interior world that leads to bad behavior.
9781476792217How do your stories come to you – Character? Theme? Question? An environmental trigger, like the house that inspired The House We Grew Up In?
I tend to come up with a theme first. With The House We Grew Up In I wanted to explore hoarding, with the Making of Us I wanted to write about sperm donation and with my latest, the Girls In The Garden, I wanted to write about a communal garden and the what-if aspect of allowing your children more freedom than is normal. Themes come to me sometimes like little shiny gifts from the universe and other times I have to scrape them out of the darkest corners of my consciousness with a blunt knife. It varies.
At the start of your career, there was a hole in the market for books and television that explored the lives of twenty-somethings. Enter Bridget Jones, “Friends,” and Ralph’s Party. What holes in the market do you see now?
If I could see a hole in the market believe me I’d be filling it! I hate to say it but second guessing the book market is a hiding to nothing. It cannot be done. Publishing is nebulous and unpredictable – who, for example, might have put their finger to their chin five years ago and said ‘Hmm, you know, what the book reading public are really after right now must be some low level bondage and S&M.’ No one could have predicted that.
Also, publishing is a slow process. You may have spotted a “gap”, it would then take a year to write the book, another few months to secure a publisher and then another year to put the books onto bookshelves, by which time the moment will most likely have passed. So the advice I always give an aspiring writer is to look not at the market, but within themselves. That’s the only place you should be looking for things to write about.
Speaking of Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, that book has become the poster child for what some call ‘chick lit.’ Many people say that ‘chick lit is dead.’ Many say it isn’t. Many more say it was but it changed and now it’s back. (Many of us ask why we’re still calling it ‘chick lit’ and ask why ‘popular fiction’ or ‘commercial fiction’ or ‘women’s fiction’ won’t suffice?) One observation another author mentioned in her interview was that female protagonists have become more agents of their own change/discovery (as opposed to love-saves-girl). What do you see happening in commercial fiction today?
I feel like the Bridget Jones era was all about female readers wanting to see their lives and their insecurities reflected back at them in an endearing and relatable way; they wanted to know they weren’t the only ones who chose crap boyfriends, drank too much and worried incessantly about their weight. They wanted to see themselves as cute and desirable in spite of all their flaws, and they wanted there to be a happy ending.
Nowadays it seems that women want to see their worst nightmares reflected back at them. All the what-if scenarios. What-if my child didn’t come home from school? What-if my husband was actually mad and trying to poison me? What-if that man I flirted with at work today turned out to be a psycho stalker and set out to ruin my perfect life? What-if I took my eye off my child for one minute to attend to some needs of my own and someone stole them away from me? It’s a form of escapism; if the bad shit is happening to someone else then it’s not happening to you. It makes the reader feel safer in their own world.
You once said that your goal was to write a commercial book of a literary standard. In this interviewer’s opinion, you have done just that several times over. What have been the most impactful lessons since your first published book on your storytelling and writing?
I have had to learn and then unlearn the same lesson. Many moons ago when I was only three books into my career, I was telling my editor about my work in progress and I got to a certain point and then said; ‘and I don’t know what happens after that.’ She said, ‘that’s OK, nothing needs to happen.’ I used that as a mantra for many books subsequently but the books I’m writing now are very different to those early ‘relationship’ novels and nowadays, well, something really does need to happen, it needs to happen, ideally, at the end of every chapter and I need to know what it is.
I think writing The Third Wife was the biggest lesson in this. The theme I wanted to explore was the impact on children of having a many-times-married parent. But I jumped into it without really knowing what was going to happen, hoping it would come to me as I wrote. It didn’t and I had to kind of pin the story on it halfway through and in my opinion it wasn’t the right story and I didn’t tell it properly and I feel a little like I wasted an opportunity to write about something I was genuinely interested in.
Who do you write for? Do you have someone in mind that you intend to satisfy when you are writing?
I very much write for myself. I write books that I would like to read, which is why my books have changed direction so much over the years. When I was writing my ‘relationship’ novels, back in the old days, I used to keep a little imaginary man on my shoulder as I wrote to keep me from veering too far over into girly girl territory – I always wanted those books to have a little edge – but nowadays I have no imaginary people on my shoulder. It’s just me and myself.
What worked for you in your early days to expand your audience?
I had a run of amazing good fortune during the publication of my debut novel. It was selected to be reviewed on a very staid and high-brow panel review show on the BBC. As far as I was aware they had never reviewed something as lightweight and commercial as my book before and I assumed they’d just picked it to have a bit of fun with, a bit of ‘what-the-hell’s-going-on-with-all-these-young-girls-about-town-getting-six-figure-book-deals? type of thing. But actually all four members of the panel loved the book which was so unexpected and atypical that all the broadsheets sat up and paid attention and suddenly I was splashed all over the papers and was the writer of the moment.
My first book sold 250k copies in its first year of release (a big deal in the UK), but sadly I didn’t take all those first readers with me (they clearly didn’t agree with the members of the review show panel!) and none of my subsequent books sold nearly as well. All the publicity in the world can’t sell a book to someone who doesn’t like your books!
What advice would you like to give to aspiring writers?
I would give some very practical advice with regard to the actual getting-the-book-written rather than the-writing-of-the-book. DO NOT write on the same computer or in the same place where you do your email and surfing. Use another laptop, borrow one if you must. DO NOT install email on it. Then take it out of the house with you away from your wifi and write somewhere where you can’t access the internet.
Writing on the same computer you surf and email on is like writing in the middle of your favourite shop, with all your mates having a laugh around the corner and people dropping interesting notes into your lap every few minutes. You cannot write a book with the internet at your fingertips. You just can’t.
And finally…
Muffin or Crumpet?
Crumpet. With marmite.
Game of Thrones or Downton Abbey?
Am possibly the only person in the world who hasn’t seen Downton, so it will have to be Game of Thrones.
Neighborhood Garden or Public Park?
Definitely neighbourhood garden. Mainly for ease of access to my house.
Jeans or Skirts?
Jeans. Not blue jeans, but skinny jeans, in dark colours.
Beer or Wine?
Love both, but wine is kinder to my waistline.
Thank you, Lisa, so much dropping in. Welcome to the WWWB family! We will be supporting and rooting for you forever more. ☺
THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN –
Jewell, Lisa THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN Atria (Adult Fiction) $25.00 6, 7 ISBN: 978-1-4767-9221-7
Mysterious, life-threatening injuries to a teenage girl cause previously close-knit neighborhood families to examine each other with concern and suspicion. Displaced after their father's psychotic break, during which he burned down their house, young teenagers Pip and Grace move with their mother, Clare, to a London community steeped in multigenerational family drama stemming from the unexplained death of a 15-year-old girl in the communal garden years earlier. Pip's deep longing for her absent father and concern about her sister's new friends--the other teenagers in the community--are conveyed through letters to her father. This teenage narrative perspective is balanced with those of Adele, a neighborhood mother who home-schools her three teenage daughters, and, to a lesser extent, Clare as she considers whether to reconnect with her husband upon his release from the hospital. The novel is split into sections: the opening features Pip finding a violently injured and unconscious Grace in the park following a community party, and the following sections explore the complex adult and teenage relationships both leading up to the attack and following it. Although Grace survives, the community is reminded of the unsolved death of a teenage girl who was related to or known by many of the adults in the neighborhood, which makes them question how well they know each other or their children's friends. While Jewell creates a story ripe with anticipation and emotion, she ultimately fails to develop a climax that would bring together the several dramatic tropes at work (a mentally unstable father who believes he hears rodents in the walls; the tensions between teenage girls, especially when it comes to friendships and dating). The reader is left trying to reconcile the adult characters' actions with the insufficient explanations of their motivations. Jewell offers an intriguing premise and characters but has difficulty maintaining plot momentum and creating depth of character.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Jewell, Lisa: THE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2016. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A449241088/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cb24bdf0. Accessed 27 June 2024.
The Girls in the Garden. By Lisa Jewell. June 2016. 313p. Atria, $25 (9781476792217).
Clare Wild knows that a new flat can't entirely erase the stress of the past few months, but she is happy to have a place that her daughters, Grace and Pip, can call home. The flat backs up to Virginia Park, a wide expanse of greenery full of roving kids, friendly adults, and neighborly goodwill. It's the type of place where kids run in and out of each other's houses, and parents are happy to feed whoever's at the table. As lovely as things seem on the surface, Virginia Park still has its secrets. When 13-year-old Grace is found unconscious in a hidden corner of the park after a summer party, the formerly friendly and welcoming neighbors become guarded and suspicious. Jewell's latest is full of suspense yet emotionally grounded, with descriptions of teenage angst and young love that will be instantly familiar to any parents of tweens or teenagers. Jewell alternates between adult and juvenile narrators to keep the pacing taut, fully immersing the reader in the mysterious Virginia Park community. Fans of Liane Moriarty, Paula Hawkins, and Carla Buckley will adore this peek inside a gated community that truly takes care of its own, no matter the consequences.--Stephanie Turza
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Turza, Stephanie. "The Girls in the Garden." Booklist, vol. 112, no. 13, 1 Mar. 2016, pp. 60+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A447443629/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=468eb681. Accessed 27 June 2024.
THE GIRLS IN THE GARDENBy Lisa Jewell313 pp. Atria Books. $25.
At first, the gated two-acre communal garden in central London appears idyllic. Bordered by private residences, Virginia Park is an urban experiment, a place where the inhabitants of grand stucco-fronted mansions and down- market apartment buildings can lay claim to the same rose garden and playground.
The idea of a private oasis appeals deeply to Clare Wild, who moves to the neighborhood with her two daughters, 13-year-old Grace and 12-year-old Pip, after her schizophrenic husband, who has burned down their home, is institutionalized. While Clare struggles to adjust to life as a single parent, her daughters try to gain acceptance into a clique of young teenagers, a group that includes three sisters who live in the mansion end of the park and, from much humbler abodes, a spiky pixie of a girl named Tyler and a sweet mixed-race boy named Dylan -- kids who are free to disappear into one another's homes with little interference or oversight from their trusting parents.
Adele Howes, the bohemian mother of the three sisters -- all named after plants -- considers the park an ''unpaid babysitter. Her children were safe out there.'' She home-schools her daughters, cooks them wholesome food and does her best to shelter them from the vacuous ''mainstream world'' by denying them access to social media or smartphones. Adele wants to keep her children in a bubble, but she doesn't stop to consider what else that bubble might enclose.
Jewell has explained that the conceit for ''The Girls in the Garden,'' her 13th novel, was borrowed from real life: Her family's home abuts just such a communal garden. As I sat reading the novel in my postage-stamp-size yard in Berkeley, the idea of having access to a vast yet private space -- a place where my young daughters would never want for a playmate and I'd never lack for company after a solitary day of writing -- filled me with envy. But Jewell's fictitious utopia soon took on baleful overtones. When a longtime resident asks Adele to edit her memoir, she discovers disturbing secrets about several prominent denizens, including her own husband. ''Things happen in that park differently to how they happen in the real world. Different rules apply,'' one character tells the stunned Adele, a statement that will prove ominously prescient.
Certainly the longest shadow is cast by the unresolved death of 15-year-old Phoebe Rednough, whose body was found outside the rose garden two decades earlier. Was her demise the result of an overdose? Of foul play? The official cause was never determined, the evidence simply ruled ''inconclusive,'' but suspicions linger. On the night of Virginia Park's annual summer party, held a few months after Clare and her girls move in, neighborly relations are frayed when one boozy mother forgets to self-censor, a teenager concocts a devious plot to rid herself of a romantic rival, and Clare's older daughter is found bleeding and unconscious in the same place where Phoebe died.
The twinned mysteries of Phoebe's death and Grace's assault provide the major tensions of the plot. Jewell offers up a rogues' gallery of suspects for each crime, but focuses on the violence against Grace. Who's responsible? The pervy grandpa with the prosthetic foot? The hot dad who dances to ''Blurred Lines'' at a dinner party? An intruder?
Faithful to the thriller genre, Jewell makes liberal use of red herrings and plot twists. But the story often gets bogged down in relationship details, never gathering enough momentum to become a true page-turner. Still, the answer to the whodunit is a sly -- and satisfying -- surprise.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: Lisa Jewell (PHOTOGRAPH BY JASCHA GORDON)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Scheeres, Julia. "The Secrets Garden." The New York Times Book Review, 31 July 2016, p. 21(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A459539523/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=575b6698. Accessed 27 June 2024.
I Found You
Lisa Jewell
Atria Books
c/o Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.simonsays.com
9781501154591, $26.00, HC, 352pp, www.amazon.com
In a windswept British seaside town, single mom Alice Lake finds a man sitting on the beach outside her house. He has no name, no jacket, and no idea how he got there. Against her better judgment, she invites him inside. Meanwhile, in a suburb of London, twenty-one-year-old Lily Monrose has only been married for three weeks. When her new husband fails to come home from work one night she is left stranded in a new country where she knows no one. Then the police tell her that her husband never existed. Twenty-three years earlier, Gray and Kirsty are teenagers on a summer holiday with their parents. Their annual trip to the quaint seaside town is passing by uneventfully, until an enigmatic young man starts paying extra attention to Kirsty. Something about him makes Gray uncomfortable--and it's not just that he's playing the role of protective older brother. Two decades of secrets, a missing husband, and a man with no memory are at the heart of "I Found You" and clearly reveal author Lisa Jewell as a genuinely original and skilled novelist with an impressive flair for deftly crafted narratives and surprising plot development. While very highly recommended, especially for community library General Fiction collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that "I Found You" is also available in a Kindle format ($12.99). Librarians please note that there is a complete and unabridged CD audio book edition of "I Found You" (Dreamscape Media, 9781520068374, $29.99).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
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"I Found You." Wisconsin Bookwatch, Apr. 2017, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A710606879/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1b8b57b3. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Jewell, Lisa. I Found You. Atria. Apr. 2017. 352p. ISBN 9781501154591. $26; pap. ISBN 9781501154607. $16; ebk. ISBN 9781501154614. F
In a windswept British seaside town, single mom Alice encounters a man sitting on the beach near her home. The lightly dressed stranger has no idea how he got there and recalls nothing of himself A standard opening for an amnesiac tale right? Against her better judgment, Alice invites him inside. Here begins an intriguing story of a young bride, a lonely single mother, and perhaps a murder that happened decades earlier. Drawn to this visitor, Alice has mixed feelings about his memory returning, but as the days go by, the man gets disturbing flashes of his former self. Meanwhile, in London, newlywed Lily frantically searches for her husband, who fails to come home one evening, but the clues she finds make her second guess her marriage. As the mysterious man, "Gray," peels back his clouded memory, a thoroughly compelling story unfolds. Who is he? What happened at this seaside town in his teenage years? VERDICT Jewell (The Girls in the Garden) is a wonderful storyteller. Her characters are believable, her writing is strong and poetic, and her narrative is infused with just enough intrigue to keep the pages turning. Readers of Liane Moriarty, Paula Hawkins, and Ruth Ware will love. [See Prepub Alert, 10/31/16.]--Susan Clifford Braun, Bainbridge Island, WA
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Clifford, Susan. "Jewell, Lisa. I Found You." Library Journal, vol. 142, no. 3, 15 Feb. 2017, pp. 79+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A481649076/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da8c96a5. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Jewell, Lisa I FOUND YOU Atria (Adult Fiction) $26.00 4, 25 ISBN: 978-1-5011-5459-1
Three lonely people meet when their lives are in upheaval and learn they are also connected by a haunting 20-year-old mystery.Single mother Alice offers a stranger sitting on the beach in the rain a windbreaker, and, upon learning he has no recollection of who he is or how he got there, she invites him to stay in her guesthouse. Her children give him the name Frank, and Alice works to help him regain his memory and learn how he ended up in the north of England. Near London, Lily, a young wife from the Ukraine who has been living in England with her new husband, panics when he fails to return home. After the local police inform Lily his passport is fake, she begins to search for him to determine whom she married and why he suddenly abandoned her. These two stories set in present-day Britain are interwoven with a third story set in 1993 of a family's annual vacation to the beach, which takes a troubling and ominous turn after the 15-year-old daughter, Kirsty, begins dating a local 19-year-old guy, Mark. As Jewell's (The Girls in the Garden, 2016, etc.) novel progresses, the tensions in each story heighten as the characters must confront questions of whether we ever truly know other people or if we always keep part of ourselves hidden away. While these are not new questions, Jewell's page-turner approaches them in a riveting manner. Its numerous twists avoid predictability, and the novel is well-paced as it weaves the three narratives together. Toward the end of the novel, as Alice, Frank, and Lily meet and begin to learn who has brought them together, the plot moves a bit too quickly for a full explanation of everyone's identity and motivations. Yet even these too-short character back stories serve to circle back and reinforce the novel's central question: how much does knowing a person in the present count for? Dark and moody, this is a mystery with substance.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Jewell, Lisa: I FOUND YOU." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A480921961/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8ee66a63. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Jewell, Lisa THEN SHE WAS GONE Atria (Adult Fiction) $26.00 4, 24 ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack's life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie's remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie's funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd's charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy's mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell's (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie's disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy's mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie's experiences and Laurel's discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel's end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Jewell, Lisa: THEN SHE WAS GONE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A527248281/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d53cd7ec. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Then She Was Gone. By Lisa Jewell. Apr. 2018.368p. Atria, $26 (9781501154645); e-book, $13.99 (9781501154669).
Laurel Mack's world was destroyed when her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, disappeared on her way to the library. Ellie, a bright, happy girl whose only care in the world was having to be tutored to pass her math exams, seemingly vanished from her suburban London neighborhood--CCTV cameras show nothing, and the police have no leads, so she's chalked up as a runaway. But 10 years later, after the family has fractured, remains are found along with Ellie's belongings, putting the case to rest. Laurel still has questions but is desperate to finally move on, so when charmingly geeky Floyd comes into her life, she latches on to him. But Floyd's young daughter, Poppy, bears an uncanny resemblance to Ellie--and, strangely, he has a connection to Ellie's former math tutor. Jewell teases out her twisty plot at just the right pace, leaving readers on the edge of their seats. There will surely be comparisons to novels such as Emma Donoghue's Room (2010) as well as all of the "Girl" thrillers, but Jewell's latest really isn't at all derivative. Her multilayered characters are sheer perfection, and even the most astute thriller reader won't see where everything is going until the final threads are unknotted. Those few who do guess early won't mind, as the pace and prose will keep them hooked.--Rebecca Vnuk
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Vnuk, Rebecca. "Then She Was Gone." Booklist, vol. 114, no. 13, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 28. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A532250862/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3183c922. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Then She Was Gone
Lisa Jewell. Atria, $26 (368p) ISBN 978-1-50115464-5
More than a whiff of The Lovely Bones wafts through this haunting domestic noir from bestseller Jewell (7 Pound You). The disappearance of beautiful, brainy 15-year-old Ellie Mack in May 2005 from her north London neighborhood takes a terrible toll on her parents and siblings, even a decade later. Most profoundly affected is her now-divorced mother, Laurel. After a shocking development in the cold case jolts Laurel from her lonely limbo, Laurel stuns herself by agreeing to dinner with a man she meets
in a cafe, genial author Floyd Dunn, and quickly falls into a relationship with him and the younger of his daughters, precocious nine-year-old Poppy--who reminds Laurel eerily in so many ways of Ellie. But then unsettling coincidences start to emerge, most notably Laurel's discovery that Floyd's former partner, Noelle Donnelly, who he claims vanished five years earlier after dumping Poppy with him, was Elbe's math tutor. Skillfully told by several narrators (some of them ghostly), Jewell's gripping novel transcends its plot improbabilities to connect with an emotionally resonant story of loss, grief, and renewal. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
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"Then She Was Gone." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 5, 29 Jan. 2018, p. 168. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A526116515/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b1ee21c7. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Jewell, Lisa WATCHING YOU Atria (Adult Fiction) $26.00 12, 26 ISBN: 978-1-5011-9007-0
A young newlywed's life is upended, and a picturesque neighborhood is shattered, when she is suspected of a savage murder.
At the beginning of a new year, Joey Mullen moves back to England from Ibiza with Alfie, her husband, whom she hastily married out of grief over the death of her mother. Jack, Joey's older brother, invites the young couple to move into his painted Victorian house in the upscale Bristol neighborhood of Melville Heights so they can get on their feet financially and help with the baby that Jack and his wife, Rebecca, are expecting. Joey quickly becomes infatuated with their neighbor Tom Fitzwilliam, a new headmaster charged with improving the local school. Her crush only intensifies when Alfie suggests having a baby, and Joey begins to suspect her marriage was a mistake. Meanwhile, Tom's wife, Nicola, struggles to fill her days and remains oblivious to their son, Freddie, who regularly spies on his neighbors and the village's teenage schoolgirls, taking their photos and keeping a detailed log of everyone's activities. This surveillance exacerbates the paranoia and mental illness of another neighbor, the mother of 16-year-old Jenna, one of Tom's students. Jenna's mother is convinced that she knows the Fitzwilliam family from a vacation incident years earlier (and that the family is now stalking her), but Jenna is more concerned that Tom may be having an inappropriate relationship with her best friend. After several months, tension in the neighborhood explodes, and Joey is suspected of a brutal murder. However, as the police gather evidence, it becomes clear how many secrets each family has been hiding. Jewell (Then She Was Gone, 2017, etc.) adeptly weaves together a complex array of characters in her latest thriller. The novel opens with the murder investigation and deftly maintains its intensity and brisk pace even as the story moves through different moments in time over the previous three months. Jewell's use of third-person narration allows her to explore each family's anxieties and sorrows, which ultimately makes this novel's ending all the more unsettling.
An engrossing and haunting psychological thriller.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Jewell, Lisa: WATCHING YOU." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A560344821/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=df9ff0af. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Watching You.
By Lisa Jewell.
Dec. 2018.336p. Atria, $26 (9781501190070); e-book, $13.99 (9781501190094).
Jewell follows her New York Times best-seller Then She Was Gone (2018) with another stellar domestic drama, this one set in an affluent neighborhood in Bristol, England. She has created a cast of well-defined characters whose lives are already intertwined at the start, even though they don't know it yet. Everyone has some sort of secret, and everyone is spying on each other, tracking each other, and orchestrating encounters with each other in a brilliantly plotted progression that has a charismatic schoolmaster at the center. Tom Fitzwilliam's neighbor is consumed by her infatuation with him. One of his students is also smitten, although her BFF doesn't trust him. His son, Freddie, in the throes of teenage angst, is confused by the mercurial relationship between his parents. Twenty years earlier, a schoolgirl chronicled her obsession with a handsome young teacher named Mr. Fitzwilliam in her diary, and when the revelation of her suicide is stirred into an already bubbling cauldron of resentment and suspicion, it boils over and results in a brutal murder with an intriguing assortment of suspects. Expert misdirection keeps the reader guessing, and the rug-pulled-out-from-beneath-your-feet conclusion--coupled with one final, bone-chilling revelation--is stunning. Best not to bet on anyone. A compulsive read guaranteed to please fans of A J. Finn and Ruth Ware.--Jane Murphy
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
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Murphy, Jane. "Watching You." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 5, 1 Nov. 2018, p. 26. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A562369595/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d31da680. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Watching You By Lisa Jewell Atria $26, 336 pages 9781501190070 Audio, eBook available
Thriller
Lisa Jewell's domestic thrillers regularly show up on bestseller lists, and her latest, Watching You, should be no exception. The mysterious murder at its center unfolds gradually, as piece by piece the past and present relationships between her intriguing cast of characters begin to fit together.
Tom Fitzwilliam is the new headmaster of the Melville Academy in Bristol, England, and he's called Superhead by the local newspaper due to his many postings to failing schools and his reputation for quickly turning them around. Tom lives with his wife, Nicola, in an upscale neighborhood. Nicola is an enigmatic, unhappy woman with a troubled past. Their only child, 14-year-old Freddie, believes he has Asperger's. He hopes to work for MI5 one day and spends all his free time spying on the neighbors from his upstairs window, documenting what he sees with his camera and keeping a logbook of the neighborhood comings and goings.
One of Freddie's voyeuristic targets is Joey Mullen, a young woman who lives two doors down from the Fitzwilliams. Joey is newly married and drifting from job to job. She and her husband live with Joey's older brother, Jack, a physician, and his wife, Rebecca, a "strait-laced systems analyst." Rebecca is pregnant, but she's apparently not overjoyed about becoming a mother. Joey is completely smitten with Tom Fitzwilliam and begins planning how to meet him "accidentally," which is all documented by Freddie's watchful eyes.
Sixteen-year-old Jenna, a student at the Academy, and her mother live nearby, and they're also subjects of Freddie's surveillance. Jenna's mother, who increasingly shows signs of paranoia, seems to believe she saw the Fitzwilliam family on holiday years ago, and that they were involved in an unpleasant incident that she can't quite remember.
From the novel's early pages, Jewell includes excerpts from police interviews conducted at the Bristol police station. The reader knows someone has been murdered but not their identity. Little by little, Jewell sprinkles clues about the pasts of each of her characters, and these hidden connections to the victim may turn out to be motives to commit murder. But only near the end does one suspect emerge as the killer --and a shocking final revelation completely takes the reader by surprise.
Jewell's latest will be quickly devoured by readers of Gillian Flynn, A.J. Finn and Ruth Ware.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 BookPage
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Donovan, Deborah. "Watching You." BookPage, Jan. 2019, p. 18. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A567426095/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eeda749a. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Jewell, Lisa THE FAMILY UPSTAIRS Atria (Adult Fiction) $27.00 11, 5 ISBN: 978-1-5011-9010-0
Three siblings who have been out of touch for more than 20 years grapple with their unsettling childhoods, but when the youngest inherits the family home, all are drawn back together.
At the age of 25, Libby Jones learns she has inherited a large London house that was held in a trust left to her by her birthparents. When she visits the lawyer, she is shocked to find out that she was put up for adoption when she was 10 months old after her parents died in the house in an apparent suicide pact with an unidentified man and that she has an older brother and sister who were teenagers at the time of their parents' deaths and haven't been seen since. Meanwhile, in alternating narratives, we're introduced to Libby's sister, Lucy Lamb, who's on the verge of homelessness with her two children in the south of France, and her brother, Henry Lamb, who's attempting to recall the last few disturbing years with his parents during which they lost their wealth and were manipulated into letting friends move into their home. These friends included the controlling but charismatic David Thomsen, who moved his own wife and two children into the rooms upstairs. Henry also remembers his painful adolescent confusion as he became wildly infatuated with Phineas, David's teenage son. Meanwhile, Libby connects with Miller Roe, the journalist who covered the story about her family, and the pair work together to find her brother and sister, determine what happened when she was an infant, and uncover who has recently been staying in the vacant house waiting for Libby to return. As Jewell (Watching You, 2018, etc.) moves back and forth from the past to the present, the narratives move swiftly toward convergence in her signature style, yet with the exception of Lucy's story, little suspense is built up and the twists can't quite make up for the lack of deep characters and emotionally weighty moments.
This thriller is taut and fast-paced but lacks compelling protagonists.
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"Jewell, Lisa: THE FAMILY UPSTAIRS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A597739560/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f75f4a8c. Accessed 27 June 2024.
he Family Upstairs. By Lisa Jewell. Oct. 2019.320p. Atria, $27 (9781501190100); e-book, $12.99 (9781501190124).
Libby receives a surprise inheritance on her twenty-fifth birthday: she's been left a mansion in London's Chelsea neighborhood, the house where she was abandoned as a baby. It was a huge scandal at the time, as she was clean and cared for, but her parents were long dead in the kitchen, having entered into a suicide pact. All of this had been hidden from Libby until now, and she's determined to find out the truth behind her family's history. Meanwhile, in France, Lucy travels from hostel to hostel with her two children in tow, barely getting by as a street musician, when she gets a mysterious text that drives her to extremes in order to get back to London. Her connection to the Chelsea house (and therefore Libby) is at the heart of Jewell's latest thriller. The suspense mounts, moving from Libby to Lucy in the present as well as in mesmerizing flashbacks. No one is quite whom they seem to be, and everyone is willing to do whatever is needed in order to get what they want. Another dark winner from Jewell, who expertly teases out her tricky tale with stunning moments and richly drawn characters.--Rebecca Vnuk
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
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Vnuk, Rebecca. "The Family Upstairs." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 1, 1 Sept. 2019, p. 51. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A601763584/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bcd8da0e. Accessed 27 June 2024.
The Family Upstairs
Lisa Jewell. Atria, $27 (320p) ISBN 978-1-5011-9010-0
Twenty-five years before the present-day action of this un-put-downable psychological thriller from bestseller Jewell (Watching You), the bodies of Henry and Martina Lamb and an unknown man were found in the Lambs' mansion in London's exclusive Chelsea district. How did they die, and where were the Lambs' children? Three entwined stories provide some answers. Homeless Lucy, a busking violinist, is sitting on a French beach with her son when she receives a message on her phone: "The baby is 25." Lucy's account of her voyage to London merges with that of Libby Jones. Libby, adopted when she was around a year old, is working for a kitchen design company in St. Albans when she receives the news that she has inherited the Lambs' family home. Henry, the Lambs' son, describes his childhood and the terrifying events that changed all their lives when the charismatic charlatan David Thomsen came to stay. Investigating her past, Libby gets much more than she bargained for. Distinct, well-developed characters, shifting points of view, and a disturbing narrative that pulses with life create an enthralling tale full of surprises. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Literary. (Nov.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Family Upstairs." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 36, 9 Sept. 2019, p. 48. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A600790103/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1bb7826c. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Byline: Mary Cadden, USA TODAY
How well do you know your neighbors? Your friends? Even your family? How well do they know you? When it comes to others, we are often afflicted with a form of tunnel vision. Instead of seeing people as whole beings, we view them based on our preconceptions and our limited experiences. It can make for a great many misunderstandings.
It is this form of tunnel vision that Lisa Jewell exploits brilliantly in her latest thriller, "Invisible Girl" (Atria, 368 pp., ***. After all, a person can be anything - a therapist, a spouse, a colleague, a neighbor, a stranger. But depending on our interactions with them, their anything can be our everything. Even if we have an intimate relationship with someone, they often still cease to exist outside of our own experiences with them. We are all guilty of it.
Jewell highlights how our views of the world and of others can often render us blind to what is truly going on around us.
First there is Owen Pick, a lonely single man in his 30s living with his aunt, who is suspended from his job for sexual misconduct. As a result, his frustration lures him into the online subculture of Incels ("involuntary celibates").
Across the street there is Cate Fours and her family. Cate is a part-time physiotherapist with two teens, Georgia, 15 and Josh, 14. Husband and father Roan is a child psychologist. Cate and Roan's marriage is in a better stage after a rocky incident the year previous.
Finally, there is Saffyre Maddox, 17, who lives nearby. A troubled young woman, Saffyre is a former patient of Roan's. And while she no longer sees him for therapy, she has not ended her relationship with him. Instead, she opts to follow and keep tabs on her therapist from a distance.
They are all living their lives independently of one another, or so it seems, each struggling with his or her own internal struggles. Until one night, when all of their lives drastically change.
On Valentine's Day evening, Saffyre disappears. And this is where the story changes, in more ways than one. There has been a spate of sexual assaults in the area recently. Was Saffyre a victim herself? Assumptions turn to accusations and aspersions as the lives of Saffyre, Owen and Cate, and her family become intertwined.
At the moment of Saffyre's disappearance, Jewell deftly changes the narrative of the novel from a steady-paced multi-narrative to one that is frenzied and nonlinear.
While the storylines of most of the characters continue to progress in a forward trajectory after Saffyre's disappearance, Saffyre's timeline is reversed, focusing more intimately on the days and circumstances leading up to her disappearance.
The pace of the story picks up dramatically, pushing the reader back and forth in a crescendo of dueling dialogues that eventually meet on that fateful Valentine's night. Along the way, the characters begin to question their assumptions - not just of themselves, but their neighbors, spouses, children - and see them in a different light.
The novel ends with a surprising twist that, depending on one's perceptions, will leave the reader either delighted or disappointed, but definitely not indifferent. You may find find yourself asking how well you know neighbors, your friends, even your family.
How well do they know you?
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 USA Today
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Cadden, Mary. "'Invisible Girl': This thriller stands out." USA Today, 13 Oct. 2020, p. 05B. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A638257248/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3833ccfc. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Jewell, Lisa INVISIBLE GIRL Atria (Fiction None) $28.00 10, 13 ISBN: 978-1-982137-33-5
The disappearance of a teenage girl disrupts the lives of her former therapist, his family, and a lonely neighbor.
Seventeen-year-old Saffyre Maddox has been in therapy with Roan Fours, a child psychologist, for three years for self-harming after the deaths of her parents. When Roan suggests Saffyre is ready to move on, she feels betrayed and begins following Roan and spying on his wife, Cate, and two teenage children. She learns Roan is having an affair but also that multiple sexual assaults are taking place in his neighborhood. When Saffyre disappears after her blood is found by the apartments across the street from Roan’s house, Owen Pick, one of Roan and Cate’s neighbors, is arrested and jailed based on his history of visiting incel websites after having been placed on leave from his job following sexual misconduct complaints. At the same time, Cate becomes suspicious of Roan’s lies and where their son, Josh, is sneaking out to. Jewell’s latest domestic thriller features an array of characters set in a posh London neighborhood but struggles to create any real tension regarding Saffyre’s disappearance. The themes of sexual assault and incel culture are only marginally developed despite the key part each plays in the story. As such, even with these subjects, Jewell's latest is not nearly as dark as her earlier novels. This might be a welcome change if the characters had emotional depth or unique narrative voices, but they too are only superficially realized.
A lackluster and underdeveloped story.
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"Jewell, Lisa: INVISIBLE GIRL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A630892380/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5ad2f207. Accessed 27 June 2024.
The Night She Disappeared. By Lisa Jewell. Sept. 2021. 416p. Atria, $28 (9781982137366); e-book, $12.99 (9781982137380).
In England, a young couple, parents of a small child, disappear without a trace. A year later, a novelist moves into the area and soon finds herself caught up in the mystery of what happened to the missing couple. Did they run off together, leaving their child behind? Did one kill the other and then flee? Were they both murdered? Jewell takes an interesting approach here, telling the story through alternating chapters set in the past and the present, showing us the events leading up to the disappearance and the novelist's search for the answer to the mystery. Jewell, who burst onto the literary scene with 1998's Ralph's Party, is skilled at keeping readers on their toes, always challenging our expectations of where a story is heading. Many times during the course of this novel, readers will find that their theory about what happened to the missing couple is completely wrong because the author has led them into a trap. If you like to be kept guessing, this one's for you.--David Pitt
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Pitt, David. "The Night She Disappeared." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 21, 1 July 2021, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A669809335/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=855e90c6. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Lisa Jewell. Atria, $28 (416p) ISBN 978-1-9821-3736-6
In this excellent thriller from bestseller Jewell (The Family Upstairs), Tallulah and Zach, both 19, disappear after a date night that starts at a pub and takes the unmarried couple to a country estate in Surrey, England. Left behind is their infant son, whose care is assumed by Tallulah's distraught mother, Kim. A year later, Sophie Beck, a writer of cozy mysteries, moves into a cottage neat the estate with her partner, Shaun Gtay, who has just accepted a teaching position at a local school. While Shaun prepares for the new semester, Sophie discovers a hand-lettered cardboard sign in the garden that reads "Dig Here." When digging reveals what might be a vital clue to Tallulah and Zach's disappearance, Sophie joins forces with Kim, who hits never given up hope that Tallulah is still alive. Together, the two women search for the truth of what happened. Not every plot twist is plausible, but the backstory makes readers question everything they think they know as things cleverly unfold. Jewell is in top form in this suspenseful, satisfying story. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Literary. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
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"The Night She Disappeared." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 29, 19 July 2021, pp. 190+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A669907310/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ef04843a. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Byline: Mary Cadden, USA TODAY
Lisa Jewell's "The Family Remains" (Atria, 384 pp., ***1/2) does double duty - it's not just a satisfying sequel to the author's bestselling 2019 novel "The Family Upstairs," but a solid stand-alone tale of mystery and suspense.
In "The Family Upstairs," Jewell introduced us to Libby Jones, a woman who inherits a home worth millions of dollars in the fashionable Chelsea neighborhood of London. Along the way, she discovers the Lamb family. Through multiple narratives, Jewell thrilled readers with a suspenseful tale in which each character is as intriguing and inventive as Libby, so much so that the ending left readers and the author alike wanting to know more about the future of the Lamb family.
In "The Family Remains," that is exactly what readers get - more. More storylines, more characters and more suspense.
The novel opens in 2019, when a bag of human remains is fished out of the muddy banks of the Thames by a mud-larking guide. Detective Inspector Samuel Owusu goes to investigate. Whose bones are they? How long have they been there?
Then readers are taken back to 2018 London, where Rachel Rimmer is awakened by a phone call from the French Police informing her that her husband, Michael, was found murdered in France, dead from a stab wound.
And then we're taken back to 2019 again, where we meet up again with Henry Lamb. He lives with his sister Lucy and her children in London in his immaculate and expensively renovated flat. For now. It is time for Lucy and her family to go out on their own, and time for Henry to reunite with his childhood friend Finn Thomson.
What do these three apparently separate stories have to do with one another? More than you think. Flitting between 2018 and 2019, Jewell once again manages to command the reader's attention with each storyline.
The novel flows seamlessly from its prequel but can be read as a stand-alone. Jewell provides just enough background so as not to cheat the reader of important information. The page-turner will sate fans and win over new readers alike.
And if readers' reactions to "The Family Remains" is anything like "The Family Upstairs," Jewell may have an intriguing series on her hands.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 USA Today
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Cadden, Mary. "Jewell's 'Family' sequel digs deeper." USA Today, 15 Aug. 2022, p. 01D. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A713949368/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ddebf14e. Accessed 27 June 2024.
The Family Remains
Lisa Jewell. Atria, $28 (384p) ISBN 978-1-9821-7889-5
Bestseller Jewell's lively sequel to 2019's The Family Upstairs juggles three different story lines that eventually overlap. In 2019, Det. Insp. Samuel Owusu investigates skeletal remains in a black trash bag that have washed up on the bank of the Thames. In 2016, 30-ish Rachel Gold, a London-based jewelry designer, meets Michael Rimmer, with whom she has a whirlwind romance that ends with Michael's murder in Antibes in 2018.
The third plot strand focuses on creepy Henry Lamb; Henry's sister, Lucy Lamb, who was once married to Michael; and Lucy's daughter, Libby Jones, whose escape from their childhood "house of horrors" was the centerpiece of the previous book. Henry's obsessive search for Finn Thomsen, a companion from his terrifying and traumatic youth, worries Lucy, who tracks Henry to Chicago, while Libby is intent on finding her biological father. By rapidly jumping around in time, Jewell effectively keeps readers off balance all the way to the happy ending. Though this tale of child abuse and mayhem works as a standalone, those who haven't read The Family Upstairs will immediately want to rush out and do so. Agent: Deborah Schneider. Gelfman Schneider Literary. (Aug.)
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"The Family Remains." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 27, 27 June 2022, p. 39. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A709507389/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7b96c7b5. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Jewell, Lisa THE FAMILY REMAINS Atria (Fiction None) $25.20 8, 9 ISBN: 978-1-9821-7889-5
In this sequel to The Family Upstairs (2019), two siblings continue to deal with the fallout of their traumatic childhoods.
Lucy Lamb is living with her brother, Henry, after the two have been reunited, and she's focused on reconnecting with her eldest daughter, Libby, and building a more stable life for her younger kids. But when Libby locates her birth father, Phin Thomsen, who lived as a teenager with Lucy and Henry--all their parents were part of a cult led by Phin's father and died together in a suicide pact--the family begins making plans to go visit him in Botswana until word comes that Phin has taken a leave of absence from his job. After tracing Phin to Chicago, Henry leaves abruptly to go find him and cuts off all communication, prompting deep concern in Lucy, who knows of Henry's dangerous obsession with Phin (which goes so deep that Henry has fashioned himself to look like Phin). Meanwhile, human remains have been found in the Thames and traced to the childhood home Libby inherited, which leaves all three wanted for police questioning when it is determined the victim lived with Henry, Lucy, and Libby in their childhood home and was murdered. Separately, an unrelated character named Rachel Rimmer remembers her disastrous marriage when she is contacted about her abusive husband's murder. In this latest thriller, Jewell dives back into the psyche of Henry Lamb, one of her most unsettling characters. She attempts to weave together four narratives but takes too long to develop connections among the disparate stories (especially Rachel's), which means the novel is weighted down with unrelated murder victims and minor characters, both of which detract from the suspense of Henry's pursuit of Phin.
An unevenly paced thriller that fails to match its predecessor's level of intensity.
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"Jewell, Lisa: THE FAMILY REMAINS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A705356224/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=962a929f. Accessed 27 June 2024.
Jewell, Lisa NONE OF THIS IS TRUE Atria (Fiction None) $28.00 8, 8 ISBN: 9781982179007
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. "I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?" she confesses to Alix. "But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I'd like, more than anything, is to get it back." From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I'm Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie's life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: "He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel." Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix's husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it's like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix's seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix's life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie--and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix's interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie's story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
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"Jewell, Lisa: NONE OF THIS IS TRUE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A752722889/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1be49e25. Accessed 27 June 2024.
None of This Is True
Lisa Jewell. Atria, $28 (384p) ISBN 978-1-982179-00-7
In this edgy thriller from bestseller Jewell (The Family Remains), meek housewife Josie Fair and true crime podcaster Alix Summers meet by chance in a pub where both are celebrating their 45th birthdays. Immediately obsessed with her more successful counterpart, Josie engineers several "chance" meetings with Alix--including one outside her children's school--in order to forge a friendship. Instead of feeling threatened, Alix decides to feature Josie on a podcast about the lives of ordinary women. Before long, though, Josie divulges that beneath her modest middle-class home life lie instances of pedophilia, child abuse, and even murder. But are any of Josie's stories true? As Alix digs deeper, she begins to question her new friend's motives for meeting her in the first place, and through a series of reversals, comes to fear she's been set up in a game of cat and mouse. Jewell devotees who love the author's signature twisted characters and acidic cultural commentary--here focused on the travails of internet celebrity--will be satisfied by this pitch-dark outing and its shocking climax, but readers with a lower tolerance for nastiness should turn elsewhere. Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins fans, this one's for you. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider. (Aug.)
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"None of This Is True." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 26, 26 June 2023, p. 84. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A757466658/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6b87da18. Accessed 27 June 2024.
None of This Is True. By Lisa Jewell. Aug. 2023. 384p. Atria, $28 (9781982179007); e-book (9781982179021).
On the heels of first-rate thrillers, The Night She Disappeared (2021) and The Family Remains (2022), Jewell's newest could be her best yet. Alix Summer is a podcaster looking for a new subject. One evening she meets a woman named Josie in her local pub. Improbably, they are both celebrating their forty-fifth birthdays. Several days later they meet again at the school where Alix's children are students, and Josie suggests herself as an ideal subject for Alix's podcast: a woman who shares her birthday and whose life, Josie says, is full of fascinating material. Alix agrees, though once she begins to see what sort of person Josie really is, she develops minor misgivings that turn into serious doubts and then terrifying suspicions. Jewell is great at creating characters with ambiguous motivations whose position on the line between good and evil continues to shift as the story progresses, and both features are on prime display here. A terrific novel from a consistently satisfying writer.--David Pitt
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Pitt, David. "None of This Is True." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 21, 1 July 2023, p. 25. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A760091455/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=64e79038. Accessed 27 June 2024.