Table of Contents
About The Book
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
This unputdownable psychological thriller by New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell follows a woman who finds herself the subject of her own popular true crime podcast.
Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.
Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realize that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home.
But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family’s lives under mortal threat.
Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?
This unputdownable psychological thriller by New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell follows a woman who finds herself the subject of her own popular true crime podcast.
Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.
Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realize that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home.
But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family’s lives under mortal threat.
Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?
Excerpt
1. Saturday, 8 June, 2019 SATURDAY, 8 JUNE, 2019
Josie can feel her husband’s discomfort as they enter the golden glow of the gastropub. She’s walked past this place a hundred times. Thought: Not for us. Everyone too young. Food on the chalkboard outside she’s never heard of. What is bottarga? But this year her birthday has fallen on a Saturday and this year she did not say, Oh, a takeaway and a bottle of wine will be fine, when Walter had asked what she wanted to do. This year she thought of the honeyed glow of the Lansdowne, the buzz of chatter, the champagne in ice buckets on outdoor tables on warm summer days, and she thought of the little bit of money her grandmother had left her last month in her will, and she’d looked at herself in the mirror and tried to see herself as the sort of person who celebrated her birthday in a gastropub in Queen’s Park and she’d said, “We should go out for dinner.”
“OK then,” Walter had said. “Anywhere in mind?”
And she’d said, “The Lansdowne. You know. On Salusbury Road.”
He’d simply raised an eyebrow at her and said, “Your birthday. Your choice.”
He holds the door open for her now and she passes through. They stand marooned for a moment by a sign that says “Please wait here to be seated” and Josie gazes around at the early-evening diners and drinkers, her handbag pinioned against her stomach by her arms.
“Fair,” she says to the young man who appears holding a clipboard. “Josie. Table booked for seven thirty.”
He smiles from her to Walter and back again and says, “For two, yes?”
They are led to a nice table in a corner. Walter on a banquette, Josie on a velvet chair. Their menus are handed to them clipped to boards. She’d looked up the menu online earlier, so she’d be able to google stuff if she didn’t know what it was, so she already knows what she’s having. And they’re ordering champagne. She doesn’t care what Walter thinks.
Her attention is caught by a noisy entrance at the pub door. A woman walks in clutching a balloon with the words “Birthday Queen” printed on it. Her hair is winter blond, cut into a shape that makes it move like liquid. She wears wide-legged trousers and a top made of two pieces of black cloth held together with laces at the sides. Her skin is burnished. Her smile is wide. A group soon follows behind her, other similarly aged people; someone is holding a bouquet of flowers; another carries a selection of posh gift bags.
“Alix Summer!” says the woman in a voice that carries. “Table for fourteen.”
“Look,” says Walter, nudging her gently. “Another birthday girl.”
Josie nods distractedly. “Yes,” she says. “Looks like it.”
The group follows the waiter to a table just across from Josie’s. Josie sees three ice buckets already on the table, each holding two bottles of chilled champagne. They take their seats noisily, shouting about who should sit where and not wanting to sit next to their husbands, for God’s sake, and the woman called Alix Summer directs them all with that big smile while a tall man with red hair who is probably her husband takes the balloon from her hand and ties it to a chair back. Soon they are all seated, and the first bottles of champagne are popped and poured into fourteen glasses held out by fourteen people with tanned arms and gold bracelets and crisp white shirtsleeves and they all bring their glasses together, those at the furthest ends of the table getting to their feet to reach across the table, and they all say, “To Alix! Happy birthday!”
Josie fixes the woman in her gaze. “How old do you reckon she is?” she asks Walter.
“Christ. I dunno. It’s hard to tell these days. Early forties? Maybe?”
Josie nods. Today is her forty-fifth birthday. She finds it hard to believe. Once she’d been young and she’d thought forty-five would come slow and impossible. She’d thought forty-five would be another world. But it came fast and it’s not what she thought it would be. She glances at Walter, at the fading glory of him, and she wonders how different things would be if she hadn’t met him.
She’d been thirteen when they met. He was quite a bit older than her; well, a lot older than her, in fact. Everyone was shocked at the time, except her. Married at nineteen. A baby at twenty-two. Another one at twenty-four. A life lived in fast-forward and now, apparently, she should peak and crest and then come slowly, contentedly down the other side, but it doesn’t feel as if there ever was a peak, rather an abyss formed of trauma that she keeps circling and circling with a knot of dread in the pit of her stomach.
Walter is retired now, his hair has gone and so has a lot of his hearing and his eyesight, and his midlife peak is somewhere so far back in time and so mired in the white-hot intensity of rearing small children that it’s almost impossible to remember what he was like at her age.
She orders feta-and-sundried-tomato flatbread, followed by tuna tagliata (“The word TAGLIATA derives from the verb TAGLIARE, to cut”) with mashed cannellini beans, and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot (“Veuve Clicquot’s Yellow Label is loved for its rich and toasty flavors”) and she grabs Walter’s hand and runs her thumb over the age-spotted skin and asks, “Are you OK?”
“Yes, of course. I’m fine.”
“What do you think of this place, then?”
“It’s… yeah. It’s fine. I like it.”
Josie beams. “Good,” she says. “I’m glad.”
She lifts her champagne glass and holds it out toward Walter’s. He touches his glass against hers and says, “Happy birthday.”
The smile fixes on Josie’s face as she watches Alix Summer and her big group of friends, her red-haired husband with his arm draped loosely across the back of her chair, large platters of meats and breads being brought to their table and placed in front of them as if conjured out of thin air, the sound of them, the noise of them, the way they fill every inch of the space with their voices and their arms and their hands and their words. The energy they give off is effervescent, a swirling, intoxicating aurora borealis of grating, glorious entitlement. And there in the middle of it all is Alix Summer with her big smile and her big teeth, her hair that catches the light, her simple gold chain with something hanging from it that skims her gleaming collarbones whenever she moves.
“I wonder if today is her actual birthday too?” she muses.
“Maybe,” says Walter. “But it’s a Saturday, so who knows.”
Josie’s hand finds the chain she’s worn around her neck since she was thirty; her birthday gift that year from Walter. She thinks maybe she should add a pendant. Something shiny.
At this moment, Walter passes a small gift across the table toward her. “It’s nothing much. I know you said you didn’t want anything, but I didn’t believe you.” He grins at her and she smiles back. She unpeels the small gift and takes out a bottle of Ted Baker perfume.
“That’s lovely,” she says. “Thank you so much.” She leans across and kisses Walter softly on the cheek.
At the table opposite, Alix Summer is opening gift bags and birthday cards and calling out her thanks to her friends and family. She rests a card on the table and Josie sees that it has the number 45 printed on it. She nudges Walter. “Look,” she says. “Forty-five. We’re birthday twins.”
As the words leave her mouth, Josie feels the gnawing sense of grief that she has experienced for most of her life rush through her. She’s never found anything to pin the feeling to before; she never knew what it meant. But now she knows what it means.
It means she’s wrong, that everything, literally everything, about her is wrong and that she’s running out of time to make herself right.
She sees Alix getting to her feet and heading toward the toilet, jumps to her own feet, and says, “I’m going to the ladies.”
Walter looks up in surprise from his Parma ham and melon but doesn’t say anything.
A moment later Josie’s and Alix’s reflections are side by side in the mirror above the sinks.
“Hi!” says Josie, her voice coming out higher than she’d imagined. “I’m your birthday twin!”
“Oh!” says Alix, her expression immediately warm and open. “Is it your birthday today too?”
“Yes. Forty-five today!”
“Oh, wow!” says Alix. “Me too. Happy birthday!”
“And to you!”
“What time were you born?”
“God,” says Josie. “No idea.”
“Me neither.”
“Were you born near here?”
“Yes. St. Mary’s. You?”
Josie’s heart leaps. “St. Mary’s too!”
“Wow!” Alix says again. “This is spooky.”
Alix’s fingertips go to the pendant around her neck and Josie sees that it is a golden bumblebee. She is about to say something else about the coincidence of their births when the toilet door opens and one of Alix’s friends walks in.
“There you are!” says the friend. She’s wearing seventies-style faded jeans with an off-the-shoulder top and huge hoop earrings.
“Zoe! This lady is my birthday twin! This is my big sister, Zoe.”
Josie smiles at Zoe and says, “Born on the same day, in the same hospital.”
“Wow! That’s amazing,” says Zoe.
Then Zoe and Alix turn the conversation away from the Huge Coincidence and immediately Josie sees that it has passed, this strange moment of connection, that it was fleeting and weightless for Alix, but that for some reason it carries import and meaning to Josie, and she wants to grab hold of it and breathe life back into it, but she can’t. She has to go back to her husband and her flatbread and let Alix go back to her friends and her party. She issues a quiet “Bye then” as she turns to leave and Alix beams at her and says, “Happy birthday, birthday twin!”
“You too!” says Josie.
But Alix doesn’t hear her.
1 A.M.
Alix’s head spins. Tequila slammers at midnight. Too much. Nathan is pouring himself a Scotch and the smell of it makes Alix’s head spin even faster. The house is quiet. Sometimes, when they have a high-energy babysitter, the children will still be up when they get home, restless and annoyingly awake. Sometimes the TV will be on full blast. But not tonight. The softly spoken, fifty-something babysitter left half an hour ago and the house is tidy, the dishwasher hums, the cat is pawing its way meaningfully across the long sofa toward Alix, already purring before Alix’s hand has even found her fur.
“That woman,” she calls out to Nathan, pulling one of the cat’s claws out of her trousers. “The one who kept staring. She came into the toilet. Turns out it’s her forty-fifth birthday today too. That’s why she was staring.”
“Ha,” says Nathan. “Birthday twin.”
“And she was born at St. Mary’s too. Funny, you know I always thought I was meant to be one of two. I always wondered if my mum had left the other one at the hospital. Maybe it was her?”
Nathan sits heavily next to her and rolls his Scotch around a solitary ice cube, one of the huge cylindrical ones he makes from mineral water. “Her?” he says dismissively. “That is highly unlikely.”
“Why not!”
“Because you’re gorgeous and she’s…”
“What?” Alix feels righteousness build in her chest. She loves that Nathan thinks she’s pretty, but she also wishes that Nathan could see the beauty in less conventionally attractive women too. It makes him sound shallow and misogynistic when he denigrates women’s appearances. And it makes her feel as if she doesn’t really like him. “I thought she was very pretty. You know, those eyes that are so brown they’re almost black. And all that wavy hair. Anyway, it’s weird, isn’t it? The idea of two people being born in the same place, at the same time.”
“Not really. There were probably another ten babies born that day at St. Mary’s. Maybe even more.”
“But to meet one of them. On your birthday.”
The cat is curled neatly in her lap now. She runs her fingertips through the ruff of fur around her neck and closes her eyes. The room spins again. She opens her eyes, slides the cat off her lap, and runs to the toilet off the hallway, where she is violently sick.
Josie can feel her husband’s discomfort as they enter the golden glow of the gastropub. She’s walked past this place a hundred times. Thought: Not for us. Everyone too young. Food on the chalkboard outside she’s never heard of. What is bottarga? But this year her birthday has fallen on a Saturday and this year she did not say, Oh, a takeaway and a bottle of wine will be fine, when Walter had asked what she wanted to do. This year she thought of the honeyed glow of the Lansdowne, the buzz of chatter, the champagne in ice buckets on outdoor tables on warm summer days, and she thought of the little bit of money her grandmother had left her last month in her will, and she’d looked at herself in the mirror and tried to see herself as the sort of person who celebrated her birthday in a gastropub in Queen’s Park and she’d said, “We should go out for dinner.”
“OK then,” Walter had said. “Anywhere in mind?”
And she’d said, “The Lansdowne. You know. On Salusbury Road.”
He’d simply raised an eyebrow at her and said, “Your birthday. Your choice.”
He holds the door open for her now and she passes through. They stand marooned for a moment by a sign that says “Please wait here to be seated” and Josie gazes around at the early-evening diners and drinkers, her handbag pinioned against her stomach by her arms.
“Fair,” she says to the young man who appears holding a clipboard. “Josie. Table booked for seven thirty.”
He smiles from her to Walter and back again and says, “For two, yes?”
They are led to a nice table in a corner. Walter on a banquette, Josie on a velvet chair. Their menus are handed to them clipped to boards. She’d looked up the menu online earlier, so she’d be able to google stuff if she didn’t know what it was, so she already knows what she’s having. And they’re ordering champagne. She doesn’t care what Walter thinks.
Her attention is caught by a noisy entrance at the pub door. A woman walks in clutching a balloon with the words “Birthday Queen” printed on it. Her hair is winter blond, cut into a shape that makes it move like liquid. She wears wide-legged trousers and a top made of two pieces of black cloth held together with laces at the sides. Her skin is burnished. Her smile is wide. A group soon follows behind her, other similarly aged people; someone is holding a bouquet of flowers; another carries a selection of posh gift bags.
“Alix Summer!” says the woman in a voice that carries. “Table for fourteen.”
“Look,” says Walter, nudging her gently. “Another birthday girl.”
Josie nods distractedly. “Yes,” she says. “Looks like it.”
The group follows the waiter to a table just across from Josie’s. Josie sees three ice buckets already on the table, each holding two bottles of chilled champagne. They take their seats noisily, shouting about who should sit where and not wanting to sit next to their husbands, for God’s sake, and the woman called Alix Summer directs them all with that big smile while a tall man with red hair who is probably her husband takes the balloon from her hand and ties it to a chair back. Soon they are all seated, and the first bottles of champagne are popped and poured into fourteen glasses held out by fourteen people with tanned arms and gold bracelets and crisp white shirtsleeves and they all bring their glasses together, those at the furthest ends of the table getting to their feet to reach across the table, and they all say, “To Alix! Happy birthday!”
Josie fixes the woman in her gaze. “How old do you reckon she is?” she asks Walter.
“Christ. I dunno. It’s hard to tell these days. Early forties? Maybe?”
Josie nods. Today is her forty-fifth birthday. She finds it hard to believe. Once she’d been young and she’d thought forty-five would come slow and impossible. She’d thought forty-five would be another world. But it came fast and it’s not what she thought it would be. She glances at Walter, at the fading glory of him, and she wonders how different things would be if she hadn’t met him.
She’d been thirteen when they met. He was quite a bit older than her; well, a lot older than her, in fact. Everyone was shocked at the time, except her. Married at nineteen. A baby at twenty-two. Another one at twenty-four. A life lived in fast-forward and now, apparently, she should peak and crest and then come slowly, contentedly down the other side, but it doesn’t feel as if there ever was a peak, rather an abyss formed of trauma that she keeps circling and circling with a knot of dread in the pit of her stomach.
Walter is retired now, his hair has gone and so has a lot of his hearing and his eyesight, and his midlife peak is somewhere so far back in time and so mired in the white-hot intensity of rearing small children that it’s almost impossible to remember what he was like at her age.
She orders feta-and-sundried-tomato flatbread, followed by tuna tagliata (“The word TAGLIATA derives from the verb TAGLIARE, to cut”) with mashed cannellini beans, and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot (“Veuve Clicquot’s Yellow Label is loved for its rich and toasty flavors”) and she grabs Walter’s hand and runs her thumb over the age-spotted skin and asks, “Are you OK?”
“Yes, of course. I’m fine.”
“What do you think of this place, then?”
“It’s… yeah. It’s fine. I like it.”
Josie beams. “Good,” she says. “I’m glad.”
She lifts her champagne glass and holds it out toward Walter’s. He touches his glass against hers and says, “Happy birthday.”
The smile fixes on Josie’s face as she watches Alix Summer and her big group of friends, her red-haired husband with his arm draped loosely across the back of her chair, large platters of meats and breads being brought to their table and placed in front of them as if conjured out of thin air, the sound of them, the noise of them, the way they fill every inch of the space with their voices and their arms and their hands and their words. The energy they give off is effervescent, a swirling, intoxicating aurora borealis of grating, glorious entitlement. And there in the middle of it all is Alix Summer with her big smile and her big teeth, her hair that catches the light, her simple gold chain with something hanging from it that skims her gleaming collarbones whenever she moves.
“I wonder if today is her actual birthday too?” she muses.
“Maybe,” says Walter. “But it’s a Saturday, so who knows.”
Josie’s hand finds the chain she’s worn around her neck since she was thirty; her birthday gift that year from Walter. She thinks maybe she should add a pendant. Something shiny.
At this moment, Walter passes a small gift across the table toward her. “It’s nothing much. I know you said you didn’t want anything, but I didn’t believe you.” He grins at her and she smiles back. She unpeels the small gift and takes out a bottle of Ted Baker perfume.
“That’s lovely,” she says. “Thank you so much.” She leans across and kisses Walter softly on the cheek.
At the table opposite, Alix Summer is opening gift bags and birthday cards and calling out her thanks to her friends and family. She rests a card on the table and Josie sees that it has the number 45 printed on it. She nudges Walter. “Look,” she says. “Forty-five. We’re birthday twins.”
As the words leave her mouth, Josie feels the gnawing sense of grief that she has experienced for most of her life rush through her. She’s never found anything to pin the feeling to before; she never knew what it meant. But now she knows what it means.
It means she’s wrong, that everything, literally everything, about her is wrong and that she’s running out of time to make herself right.
She sees Alix getting to her feet and heading toward the toilet, jumps to her own feet, and says, “I’m going to the ladies.”
Walter looks up in surprise from his Parma ham and melon but doesn’t say anything.
A moment later Josie’s and Alix’s reflections are side by side in the mirror above the sinks.
“Hi!” says Josie, her voice coming out higher than she’d imagined. “I’m your birthday twin!”
“Oh!” says Alix, her expression immediately warm and open. “Is it your birthday today too?”
“Yes. Forty-five today!”
“Oh, wow!” says Alix. “Me too. Happy birthday!”
“And to you!”
“What time were you born?”
“God,” says Josie. “No idea.”
“Me neither.”
“Were you born near here?”
“Yes. St. Mary’s. You?”
Josie’s heart leaps. “St. Mary’s too!”
“Wow!” Alix says again. “This is spooky.”
Alix’s fingertips go to the pendant around her neck and Josie sees that it is a golden bumblebee. She is about to say something else about the coincidence of their births when the toilet door opens and one of Alix’s friends walks in.
“There you are!” says the friend. She’s wearing seventies-style faded jeans with an off-the-shoulder top and huge hoop earrings.
“Zoe! This lady is my birthday twin! This is my big sister, Zoe.”
Josie smiles at Zoe and says, “Born on the same day, in the same hospital.”
“Wow! That’s amazing,” says Zoe.
Then Zoe and Alix turn the conversation away from the Huge Coincidence and immediately Josie sees that it has passed, this strange moment of connection, that it was fleeting and weightless for Alix, but that for some reason it carries import and meaning to Josie, and she wants to grab hold of it and breathe life back into it, but she can’t. She has to go back to her husband and her flatbread and let Alix go back to her friends and her party. She issues a quiet “Bye then” as she turns to leave and Alix beams at her and says, “Happy birthday, birthday twin!”
“You too!” says Josie.
But Alix doesn’t hear her.
1 A.M.
Alix’s head spins. Tequila slammers at midnight. Too much. Nathan is pouring himself a Scotch and the smell of it makes Alix’s head spin even faster. The house is quiet. Sometimes, when they have a high-energy babysitter, the children will still be up when they get home, restless and annoyingly awake. Sometimes the TV will be on full blast. But not tonight. The softly spoken, fifty-something babysitter left half an hour ago and the house is tidy, the dishwasher hums, the cat is pawing its way meaningfully across the long sofa toward Alix, already purring before Alix’s hand has even found her fur.
“That woman,” she calls out to Nathan, pulling one of the cat’s claws out of her trousers. “The one who kept staring. She came into the toilet. Turns out it’s her forty-fifth birthday today too. That’s why she was staring.”
“Ha,” says Nathan. “Birthday twin.”
“And she was born at St. Mary’s too. Funny, you know I always thought I was meant to be one of two. I always wondered if my mum had left the other one at the hospital. Maybe it was her?”
Nathan sits heavily next to her and rolls his Scotch around a solitary ice cube, one of the huge cylindrical ones he makes from mineral water. “Her?” he says dismissively. “That is highly unlikely.”
“Why not!”
“Because you’re gorgeous and she’s…”
“What?” Alix feels righteousness build in her chest. She loves that Nathan thinks she’s pretty, but she also wishes that Nathan could see the beauty in less conventionally attractive women too. It makes him sound shallow and misogynistic when he denigrates women’s appearances. And it makes her feel as if she doesn’t really like him. “I thought she was very pretty. You know, those eyes that are so brown they’re almost black. And all that wavy hair. Anyway, it’s weird, isn’t it? The idea of two people being born in the same place, at the same time.”
“Not really. There were probably another ten babies born that day at St. Mary’s. Maybe even more.”
“But to meet one of them. On your birthday.”
The cat is curled neatly in her lap now. She runs her fingertips through the ruff of fur around her neck and closes her eyes. The room spins again. She opens her eyes, slides the cat off her lap, and runs to the toilet off the hallway, where she is violently sick.
Reading Group Guide
This reading group guide for None of This Is True includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Lisa Jewell. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author known for her “superb pacing, twisted characters, and captivating prose” (BuzzFeed), Lisa Jewell returns with a scintillating new psychological thriller about a woman who finds herself the subject of her own popular true crime podcast.
Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.
Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realize that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home.
But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family’s lives under mortal threat.
Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. Consider how the book’s title influenced your perception of events and characters. What elements were you suspicious of from the start because of the title?
2. What about a shared birthday might make you feel bonded to someone? Would you feel a sense of connection and intrigue the way Josie and Alix do? Why do you think Josie imbues this relatively ordinary coincidence with so much importance and meaning?
3. In what ways are we encouraged to see Josie in a sympathetic light in the early chapters? How does Lisa Jewell’s characterization lead us to think of Josie as just a little quirky or lonely—and ultimately harmless?
4. When researching Alix online, we learn that Josie has social media accounts but never posts anything: “She’s a consummate lurker. She never posts, she never comments, she never likes. She just looks” (page 21). How does this play out in larger ways in Josie’s life?
5. As Alix learns increasingly dark details about Josie’s life, she is disturbed but she doesn’t intervene, nor does she stop the podcast interviews. Do you think Alix should have done something? What do you think the outcome would have been?
6. Josie ponders her life and choices throughout the novel, at one point wondering how she might leave her family and live elsewhere. She thinks to herself, “Alix is the answer to everything, somehow” (page 135). Why does Josie think Alix will change her life? How do you think she envisions a change at this point in the novel?
7. What was your initial reaction to the scene in which Josie screams at and slaps Walter? After knowing the ending, how do you now understand their dynamics?
8. When Josie and Walter come for dinner at Alix and Nathan’s, it becomes clear that Josie hasn’t told Walter about the podcast. Alix thinks to herself that it’s a “classic Josie maneuver, like buying a Pomchi without checking that it really was a Pomchi . . . a sort of blundering, thoughtless, aimless approach to life. A ‘do the thing and worry about it later’ approach” (page 159). Do you agree with Alix’s characterization of Josie? Or do you think Josie is secretly more calculating?
9. In what ways does class influence the book’s events? How do the two families’ different social classes factor into the plot?
10. What details from Erin and Roxy’s stories about their childhoods and more recent events shocked you the most? Which of Josie’s lies did you assume were true and why?
11. Toward the end of the novel, we get more perspectives on Josie as a character and the truth of what she did—from her children, her mother, Katelyn, and others. With these increased points of view, how do you now see Josie?
12. In the very last scene, Josie is on a bus contemplating the past. She’s convinced herself that the way she remembers things is what really happened. Do you think we are supposed to believer her, or is she deluding herself?
13. What clues did you pick up on throughout the first half of the novel that made you think not all was as it seemed in Josie’s life? Were your predictions accurate?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Choose a true crime podcast to listen to and compare and contrast the narration approach with Alix’s podcast. As a group, consider the ethics of true crime podcasts and their rise as popular entertainment. Are there ways to tell these stories ethically while still being engaging?
2. Imagine if Lisa Jewell had chosen a different narrative structure from this novel and only told it from one point of view. What would the reading experience be like if you only had Alix’s or Josie’s POV? What might you gain and what might you lose from only one woman’s perspective?
3. Read more of Lisa Jewell’s novels and connect with her on Twitter @lisajewelluk, on Instagram @lisajewelluk, and on Facebook @lisajewellofficial.
A Conversation with Lisa Jewell
Q: Do you have a birthday twin? What interested you in the idea of connecting the two women this way?
A:
Interestingly, I do, and it’s fellow author and good friend, Louise Candlish. We were both flabbergasted when we made the discovery, it seemed extraordinary to us that we’d both come into the world on the same day and ended up doing the same job in the same very small orbit. Louise is a woman I feel a very strong bond with, although we don’t see each other much, I absolutely get her, and she makes total sense to me. So the impetus for using birthday twins as an opening into the novel definitely did not spring from my own experience. Instead it seemed an ideal opportunity to show how divergent women’s lives can be in spite of similar beginnings.
Q: None of This Is True includes podcast interviews throughout. What were you excited to explore by including a podcast within the structure, as well as by having one of the narrators be a podcaster?
A:
In fact there is no podcast within the structure of the book. All the interviews between Alix and Josie are written as part of the traditional narrative. Using a scripted podcast format was something I actively wanted to avoid, in fact. The podcast only comes alive as a script when it’s used as part of the Netflix documentary and it was that documentary that really formed the structure of the book, not the podcast itself. It was actually a relatively late addition to the book, when I realized that the tension was building in an incredibly quiet and slow burn way and I realized my readers would need something to make them fear for the outcome, and I suddenly pictured Josie’s neighbor sitting on a chair in a TV studio talking about her impressions of Josie and Walter and realized that that was the way to do it.
Q: Did you listen to any podcasts for inspiration?
A:
Not specifically, no. I’ve listened to a few weird true crime podcasts over the years, but don’t get much time to listen to audio as part of my day to day life. My inspiration for this book was taken much more from TV documentaries such as Abducted in Plain Sight, Don’t F**k With Cats, The Tinder Swindler, etc., those documentaries where you get to the end and think to yourself, “What the hell did I just watch?” That was exactly the feel and impact I wanted for my book.
Q: What was your experience of writing from Josie’s perspective? Was it challenging to be inside her head?
A:
It’s never challenging to be inside the heads of the weird characters, some of my favorite characters to write have been the oddest and the most innerving (Noelle from Then She Was Gone, Henry from The Family Upstairs, Freddie in Watching You, Owen in Invisible Girl, Lorelei in The House We Grew Up In). These kinds of characters tend to write themselves, and in fact I find the more grounded, relatable characters much harder to write about because there’s less elasticity to them, less propensity to surprise and confound, fewer places, ultimately, to go with them. I adored being inside Josie’s head, and it wasn’t until I got to the very end that I realized that her head was actually broken.
Q: Were there any plot and character revelations you were especially excited to finally give the reader?
A:
I rewrote the epilogue four times. I knew there was one more thing I could give myself (as at this point I still didn’t really truly know what had happened or who to believe) and to the reader, that would absolutely make sense of everything at the same time as turning everything on its head, and so when I wrote that epilogue and saw what had really happened through the lens of Josie’s warped and broken mind, I was as shocked as I expect my readers to be. Of course, I thought to myself, of course! All along I’d been painting Roxy in these tiny splashes of dark back story without every really exploring what a child like that might end up being capable of, especially with a pedophile for a father, a narcissist for a grandmother, and a sociopath for a mother. It was the perfect ending and made sense of everything. The relief I felt as I put it on the page was immense.
Q: Readers will be shocked by the twists and turns of this plot; did any elements surprise you while you were writing it?
A:
Oh, so many things. I always write without a plan and I really had no idea where the whole bizarre set up was heading, so pretty much every twist and turn surprised me; from Erin eating baby food, to Walter sleeping with Brooke, to Walter having once been in a relationship with Pat, to Nathan’s death at the end (I almost chickened out after I wrote that part and brought him back to life, but my editor talked me out of it!) But it was mainly the Roxy revelation at the end that blew my mind.
Q: What themes did you especially want to explore in this novel?
A:
I never go into a novel to explore themes, I’m not really interested in themes and it often surprises me when publishers and reviewers assign themes to my books after the event—but I would say that one of the things that really inspired the writing of this novel was an experience I’d had the year before I started it where I allowed another writer to shadow my writing year in order to write a book about it. The process was actually fine, and the other writer was incredibly professional and easy to work with, but I did have a moment or two of thinking, “Why am I doing this, he could be anyone?,” and that unsettling, insidious fear of “letting the wrong person in” did underscore the book as I was writing it, definitely.
Q: Can you tell us what you’re working on next?
A:
I just finished an exciting new project—a book for Marvel! It’s a crime novel set in the Marvel universe, using the character of Jessica Jones who is a private investigator with superpowers. It was massively challenging to write in some ways—because I always write without a plan it’s helpful for me to have to work within the constricts of the “real world.” Without those constricts to keep me on the straight and narrow I did lose my way a few times, much more so than when I’m writing traditional thrillers. But it was, at the same time, the best fun ever and Jessica Jones now feels like a part of me forever, definitely one of my favorite characters I’ve written to date. This means there won’t be a classic Lisa Jewell novel coming in 2024, but I hope that some of you might take a punt on my foray into sci-fi! After that my next traditional book will be a marriage scam novel, another one inspired by all the weird documentaries I’ve been watching! I start writing it in September, and it will be published in 2025.
Introduction
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author known for her “superb pacing, twisted characters, and captivating prose” (BuzzFeed), Lisa Jewell returns with a scintillating new psychological thriller about a woman who finds herself the subject of her own popular true crime podcast.
Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.
Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realize that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home.
But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family’s lives under mortal threat.
Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. Consider how the book’s title influenced your perception of events and characters. What elements were you suspicious of from the start because of the title?
2. What about a shared birthday might make you feel bonded to someone? Would you feel a sense of connection and intrigue the way Josie and Alix do? Why do you think Josie imbues this relatively ordinary coincidence with so much importance and meaning?
3. In what ways are we encouraged to see Josie in a sympathetic light in the early chapters? How does Lisa Jewell’s characterization lead us to think of Josie as just a little quirky or lonely—and ultimately harmless?
4. When researching Alix online, we learn that Josie has social media accounts but never posts anything: “She’s a consummate lurker. She never posts, she never comments, she never likes. She just looks” (page 21). How does this play out in larger ways in Josie’s life?
5. As Alix learns increasingly dark details about Josie’s life, she is disturbed but she doesn’t intervene, nor does she stop the podcast interviews. Do you think Alix should have done something? What do you think the outcome would have been?
6. Josie ponders her life and choices throughout the novel, at one point wondering how she might leave her family and live elsewhere. She thinks to herself, “Alix is the answer to everything, somehow” (page 135). Why does Josie think Alix will change her life? How do you think she envisions a change at this point in the novel?
7. What was your initial reaction to the scene in which Josie screams at and slaps Walter? After knowing the ending, how do you now understand their dynamics?
8. When Josie and Walter come for dinner at Alix and Nathan’s, it becomes clear that Josie hasn’t told Walter about the podcast. Alix thinks to herself that it’s a “classic Josie maneuver, like buying a Pomchi without checking that it really was a Pomchi . . . a sort of blundering, thoughtless, aimless approach to life. A ‘do the thing and worry about it later’ approach” (page 159). Do you agree with Alix’s characterization of Josie? Or do you think Josie is secretly more calculating?
9. In what ways does class influence the book’s events? How do the two families’ different social classes factor into the plot?
10. What details from Erin and Roxy’s stories about their childhoods and more recent events shocked you the most? Which of Josie’s lies did you assume were true and why?
11. Toward the end of the novel, we get more perspectives on Josie as a character and the truth of what she did—from her children, her mother, Katelyn, and others. With these increased points of view, how do you now see Josie?
12. In the very last scene, Josie is on a bus contemplating the past. She’s convinced herself that the way she remembers things is what really happened. Do you think we are supposed to believer her, or is she deluding herself?
13. What clues did you pick up on throughout the first half of the novel that made you think not all was as it seemed in Josie’s life? Were your predictions accurate?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Choose a true crime podcast to listen to and compare and contrast the narration approach with Alix’s podcast. As a group, consider the ethics of true crime podcasts and their rise as popular entertainment. Are there ways to tell these stories ethically while still being engaging?
2. Imagine if Lisa Jewell had chosen a different narrative structure from this novel and only told it from one point of view. What would the reading experience be like if you only had Alix’s or Josie’s POV? What might you gain and what might you lose from only one woman’s perspective?
3. Read more of Lisa Jewell’s novels and connect with her on Twitter @lisajewelluk, on Instagram @lisajewelluk, and on Facebook @lisajewellofficial.
A Conversation with Lisa Jewell
Q: Do you have a birthday twin? What interested you in the idea of connecting the two women this way?
A:
Interestingly, I do, and it’s fellow author and good friend, Louise Candlish. We were both flabbergasted when we made the discovery, it seemed extraordinary to us that we’d both come into the world on the same day and ended up doing the same job in the same very small orbit. Louise is a woman I feel a very strong bond with, although we don’t see each other much, I absolutely get her, and she makes total sense to me. So the impetus for using birthday twins as an opening into the novel definitely did not spring from my own experience. Instead it seemed an ideal opportunity to show how divergent women’s lives can be in spite of similar beginnings.
Q: None of This Is True includes podcast interviews throughout. What were you excited to explore by including a podcast within the structure, as well as by having one of the narrators be a podcaster?
A:
In fact there is no podcast within the structure of the book. All the interviews between Alix and Josie are written as part of the traditional narrative. Using a scripted podcast format was something I actively wanted to avoid, in fact. The podcast only comes alive as a script when it’s used as part of the Netflix documentary and it was that documentary that really formed the structure of the book, not the podcast itself. It was actually a relatively late addition to the book, when I realized that the tension was building in an incredibly quiet and slow burn way and I realized my readers would need something to make them fear for the outcome, and I suddenly pictured Josie’s neighbor sitting on a chair in a TV studio talking about her impressions of Josie and Walter and realized that that was the way to do it.
Q: Did you listen to any podcasts for inspiration?
A:
Not specifically, no. I’ve listened to a few weird true crime podcasts over the years, but don’t get much time to listen to audio as part of my day to day life. My inspiration for this book was taken much more from TV documentaries such as Abducted in Plain Sight, Don’t F**k With Cats, The Tinder Swindler, etc., those documentaries where you get to the end and think to yourself, “What the hell did I just watch?” That was exactly the feel and impact I wanted for my book.
Q: What was your experience of writing from Josie’s perspective? Was it challenging to be inside her head?
A:
It’s never challenging to be inside the heads of the weird characters, some of my favorite characters to write have been the oddest and the most innerving (Noelle from Then She Was Gone, Henry from The Family Upstairs, Freddie in Watching You, Owen in Invisible Girl, Lorelei in The House We Grew Up In). These kinds of characters tend to write themselves, and in fact I find the more grounded, relatable characters much harder to write about because there’s less elasticity to them, less propensity to surprise and confound, fewer places, ultimately, to go with them. I adored being inside Josie’s head, and it wasn’t until I got to the very end that I realized that her head was actually broken.
Q: Were there any plot and character revelations you were especially excited to finally give the reader?
A:
I rewrote the epilogue four times. I knew there was one more thing I could give myself (as at this point I still didn’t really truly know what had happened or who to believe) and to the reader, that would absolutely make sense of everything at the same time as turning everything on its head, and so when I wrote that epilogue and saw what had really happened through the lens of Josie’s warped and broken mind, I was as shocked as I expect my readers to be. Of course, I thought to myself, of course! All along I’d been painting Roxy in these tiny splashes of dark back story without every really exploring what a child like that might end up being capable of, especially with a pedophile for a father, a narcissist for a grandmother, and a sociopath for a mother. It was the perfect ending and made sense of everything. The relief I felt as I put it on the page was immense.
Q: Readers will be shocked by the twists and turns of this plot; did any elements surprise you while you were writing it?
A:
Oh, so many things. I always write without a plan and I really had no idea where the whole bizarre set up was heading, so pretty much every twist and turn surprised me; from Erin eating baby food, to Walter sleeping with Brooke, to Walter having once been in a relationship with Pat, to Nathan’s death at the end (I almost chickened out after I wrote that part and brought him back to life, but my editor talked me out of it!) But it was mainly the Roxy revelation at the end that blew my mind.
Q: What themes did you especially want to explore in this novel?
A:
I never go into a novel to explore themes, I’m not really interested in themes and it often surprises me when publishers and reviewers assign themes to my books after the event—but I would say that one of the things that really inspired the writing of this novel was an experience I’d had the year before I started it where I allowed another writer to shadow my writing year in order to write a book about it. The process was actually fine, and the other writer was incredibly professional and easy to work with, but I did have a moment or two of thinking, “Why am I doing this, he could be anyone?,” and that unsettling, insidious fear of “letting the wrong person in” did underscore the book as I was writing it, definitely.
Q: Can you tell us what you’re working on next?
A:
I just finished an exciting new project—a book for Marvel! It’s a crime novel set in the Marvel universe, using the character of Jessica Jones who is a private investigator with superpowers. It was massively challenging to write in some ways—because I always write without a plan it’s helpful for me to have to work within the constricts of the “real world.” Without those constricts to keep me on the straight and narrow I did lose my way a few times, much more so than when I’m writing traditional thrillers. But it was, at the same time, the best fun ever and Jessica Jones now feels like a part of me forever, definitely one of my favorite characters I’ve written to date. This means there won’t be a classic Lisa Jewell novel coming in 2024, but I hope that some of you might take a punt on my foray into sci-fi! After that my next traditional book will be a marriage scam novel, another one inspired by all the weird documentaries I’ve been watching! I start writing it in September, and it will be published in 2025.
About The Author
Photograph (c) Andrew Whitton
Lisa Jewell
Lisa Jewell is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-three novels, including None of This Is True, The Family Upstairs, and Then She Was Gone, as well as Invisible Girl and Watching You. Her novels have sold over ten million copies internationally, and her work has also been translated into twenty-nine languages. Connect with her on X @LisaJewellUK, on Instagram @LisaJewellUK, and on Facebook @LisaJewellOfficial.
Product Details
- Publisher: Atria Books (January 7, 2025)
- Length: 400 pages
- ISBN13: 9781982179014
Raves and Reviews
“The book’s unreliable narrator, dark twists and unending suspense will keep you on edge until the very last page.” —NPR
"If you liked Verity by @colleenhoover, I think you'll like this one!" —EMILY HENRY, New York Times bestselling author
"This novel is one of Jewell's best: a gloriously dark, glittering creepfest..." —AMAZON BOOK REVIEW
"Lisa Jewell is on top-form with this pitch-black fever dream of a book - darker, twistier and more compelling than ever." —RUTH WARE, New York Times bestselling author of The It Girl
"A moody, slippery novel where nobody is as they seem. As breathtaking story is revealed within story, readers peel back the layers to find revenge, a meditation on the damage done by the past, and characters who could walk into the room and sit on your sofa. Here Jewell cements her position as queen of character-led fiction." —GILLIAN MCALLISTER, New York Times bestselling author of Wrong Place, Wrong Time
"Gloriously dark and twistier than a twisty thing." —JOJO MOYES, New York Times bestselling author of Someone Else's Shoes
"I adore Lisa Jewell, and this is her best yet. I adored the unreliable characters, their dark secrets, the fateful collision of their two different worlds in the same corner of London. I simply could not leave it alone, and had to keep reading until I'd reached the heart-stopping conclusion. Utterly irresistible from the very first page." —KATHERINE FAULKNER, author of Greenwich Park
"None of This Is True is so suspenseful, so smart, so insightful. It's all three, in equal measure, all the way through. I loved the theme of family in all its glorious (and sometimes soul-destroying) forms. Lisa Jewell writes her characters with such emotional intelligence and generosity that I cared about all of them...she takes the most universal observation and tosses it in very lightly at the end of a funny sentence—and it truly takes my breath away. So much of this novel will stay in my mind forever and that's a tremendous gift." —KATHERINE HEINY, author of Early Morning Riser
Resources and Downloads
High Resolution Images
- Book Cover Image (jpg): None of This Is True Trade Paperback 9781982179014
- Author Photo (jpg): Lisa Jewell Photograph (c) Andrew Whitton(0.1 MB)
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