‘None of This is True’ by Lisa Jewell

Published by Century,
20 July 2023.
ISBN: 978-1-52919597-2 (HB)

Ask any police officer who has ever interviewed witnesses: there are as many versions of the truth as people involved in a crime. Or incident. Or any part of life.

But Alix Summer is used to interviewing people who only have their own truth to tell: people she selects for her podcasts, about ordinary women who do something extraordinary with their lives. Until she meets Josie Fair. Alix and Josie are birthday twins, born the same day in the same hospital, and celebrating their 45^th birthdays in the same restaurant, which is where they meet for the first time. But not the last.

Their lives are very different. Alix lives in a large house with her high-earning husband and two small children. She records her popular podcast series in a custom-built studio in the garden, and on the surface enjoys all the comforts of a trouble-free middle-class existence. Josie was brought up on a council estate and works part-time as a seamstress. Home is a shabby rented flat shared with her elderly retired husband and their grown-up daughter who never leaves her room. Another daughter left home at sixteen and Josie hasn’t seen her for years. 

Josie claims to be on the cusp of major changes, and Alix begins to record her story for a podcast. There is something a little odd about Josie, and Alix can’t resist being drawn in. But Alix has problems of her own, and nothing is quite as it seems...

The best kind of psychological thriller is a rich mix of intriguing characters and brooding atmosphere, and in this novel Lisa Jewell has created an abundance of both. From the outset there is something a little flaky, almost dark about Josie, which counterpoints the brightness of Alix’s world. Josie’s husband Walter is dour and taciturn, and gives nothing away; Nathan, Alix’s spouse, is openly flawed, and wears his emotions on his sleeve.

Other characters come and go, including Josie’s narcissistic mother, and Alix’s noisy and supportive sisters. The novel is cleverly structured, with here-and-now scenes interspersed with extracts from a documentary built from Alix’s recordings of Josie, allowing various people from Josie’s past to offer their versions of her truth. The overall effect is of a picture unfolding which is much wider than and rather different from Josie’s narrow and specious view of herself, and the reader is left wondering about the nature of truth.

It’s one of those books which will make you think, and doubt, and question. Above all it will keep you reading into the small hours.   
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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Lisa Jewell was born in London in 1968. She was educated at a Catholic girls’ Grammar school in Finchley. After leaving school at sixteen she spent two years at Barnet College doing an arts foundation course and then two years at Epsom School of Art & Design studying Fashion Illustration and Communication. She worked for the fashion chain Warehouse for three years as a PR assistant and then for Thomas Pink, the Jermyn Street shirt company for four years as a receptionist and PA. She started her first novel, Ralph’s Party, for a bet in 1996. She finished it in 1997 and it was published by Penguin books in May 1998. It went on to become the best-selling debut novel of that year. She has since written a further nine novels, as is currently at work on her eleventh. She now lives in an innermost part of north London with her husband Jascha, an IT consultant, her daughters, Amelie and Evie.

 http://www.lisa-jewell.co.uk/

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.