“None of This Is True” by Lisa Jewell is the thriller novel of the season, brimming with suspense and twists that make it compulsively readable and deliciously entertaining.
Josie Fair and Alix Summers are birthday twins. Meeting at a pub on their forty-fifth birthdays, they learn they were born in the same year on the same day in the same hospital. However, this innocent connection sparks a deep entwinement between these women as they use each other to attempt to escape their own confining conditions.
Alix Summers is a famous podcast host of the successful show “All Woman,” but even with this small-scale fame, she finds that the tension building in her marriage is inescapable. Josie Fair is mysterious and troubled. With a husband decades her senior and a lonely childhood, Josie seemingly has lived her life in the shadows. Both women are searching for change and see each other as their method, if not their only hope, to get it.
Calling it “birthday magic” in reference to their shared birthday and coincidental meeting, Josie tracks Alix down, viewing the feminist podcaster as the person who holds the keys to her new life. Josie convinces Alix to use her as her next subject on the podcast with the pledge that she is about to completely change her life. Though unsure, Alix agrees and gives Josie her own series titled “Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!”.
Nested in Alix’s quiet backyard recording studio, Josie pours her life story out to Alix and she learns that Josie’s life is filled with darkness and abuse. Alix, wishing to bury her own problems, becomes immersed in Josie’s. Josie spins a web that is readily devourable to Alix and her listeners; her confessions are striking and horrific. However, it soon becomes evident that Josie is not telling the whole story. And just when her fraught narrative is discovered, Josie disappears. Her disappearance leaves in her wake a host of questions that Alix must try to unearth the answers to.
While Alix, with her hours of candid audio and newfound friendship, believes she knows Josie, it becomes clear that no one knows the real Josie Fair. Further, Josie is more than just a guest on Alix’s podcast but has become entangled in Alix’s life, her deceit forcing Alix to question Josie’s very motives and morals.
“None of This Is True” by Lisa Jewell is written from multiple points of view, with a mixture of first person narrative and podcast/television interviews. This diversity of prose adds to the fast pace of the book and makes this novel gripping the whole way through.
This New York Times Bestseller is one of the best thrillers I have ever read and deserves all the accolades it receives. From the first to the last page, the reader is barely able to find their bearings before the author pulls the rug out from under them again and again, and this adrenaline ride accomplishes exactly what any thriller reader longs for. In fact, I devoured the novel in two days. “None of This Is True” is the perfect book for anyone with an interest in true crime, psychological thrillers or mysteries with unreliable narrators. This book is like an Agatha Christie novel but if your favorite true crime podcast host wrote it: full of deceiving twists and turns but with the added shock and horror of a true crime story.
“None of This Is True” by Lisa Jewell is a fast-paced book to kickstart your 2024 reading goals, truly a thrilling read meant for anyone looking to get out of a reading slump or to enjoy an utterly engrossing novel that will consume you until its last line.
