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On the evening of her 25th birthday, Libby Jones receives a letter that comes to totally transforms her understanding of her origins, and open the doors to her mysterious past. Lisa Jewell’s 17th novel, The Family Upstairs, tells the story of Libby’s efforts to answer the questions posed by her surprise inheritance of a multi-million dollar mansion in the Chelsea neighborhood of London. Libby soon learns about her adoption circumstances—she was discovered as an infant in the mansion, when police were investigating a murder suicide that occurred just a couple floors down from the baby nursery. Libby, with the help of a reporter, investigates the dark history of her newly inherited mansion.
Meanwhile, single mother of two, Lucy, is struggling to feed and house her children in the south of France, when she receives a mysterious message that reads, “the baby is 25”. Lucy decides she must return to London with her children, and her path intersects with Libby in the mysterious mansion that plays an important role in both of their lives. Jewell said in an interview with Crime by the Book that Lucy was her original inspiration for the book: “I saw a woman when I was on holiday in the South of France two summers ago, pulling her small children into the private shower block of a beach club where I was having lunch with my family. She was looking quite furtive and anxious and I assumed that she probably was not a member of the beach club… I began embellishing the bare bones of what I’d seen; I pictured her busking on the streets of Nice, escaping from London as a child after some terrible trauma, I even pictured her as a young girl running barefoot through the streets of Chelsea in the middle of the night. Essentially, I wrote the story for her”.
While Libby unfolds the mysteries of the house for herself, flashbacks in the voice of Henry, a young boy who grew up in the Chelsea home, slowly reveal the history of the place to the reader. He describes the once-sparkling family domain, filled with art and luxurious furniture, which is soon overtaken by a family whose patriarch is a con-man and a cult leader. The new family slowly drains the home and Henry’s family of all their life force. Jewell offers a harrowing portrayal of life in a home that has been overtaken by these repressive forces, a reality betrayed by the house’s glamorous exterior.
Jewell expertly weaves together the lives of Libby, Lucy, and Henry, plumbing the depths of family history and inherited traumas. As the mystery unravels itself, Jewell adds layers to her characters that serve as the additional meat-on-the-bones of the central mystery/thriller plot. The Family Upstairs is at once propulsive and sensitive, an expertly designed narrative from one of our great thriller architects.