None of This Is True: A Novel - Softcover

Jewell, Lisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1982179015 ISBN 13: 9781982179014

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

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?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1982179015
• ISBN 13: 9781982179014
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland