She keeps the reader at the edge of the seat all through her narration.
Readers and critics often review her novels as “unputdownable.”
Her characters haunt you for many days after you have finally put the novel down.
Lisa Jewell’s collection has many precious jewels for the ones who feel well-rested in the company of engaging, gripping fiction. At bookshops and libraries, Jewell’s books are grouped under the categories of fiction, romance, thriller, and suspense, and almost all of them have been global bestsellers. But still, you could be new to her school. So, before we jump to what you should pick first from her oeuvre of almost 20 books, we would love to tell you a little bit about her journey as an author—for she has an inspiring story to offer.
Born in 1968 in London to middle-class, working parents, Jewell was intent on making a career in fashion, art, and design. And even though she wrote poems as a child and read voraciously, she received higher formal education in art and design and worked in fashion merchandising for a few years in the capacity of a PR assistant, receptionist, and PA. She loved books but thought she would write one when she was much older and had enough experience with life to create characters and narrate their experiences.
Somewhere in the mid-1990s, having been made redundant at her job as a secretary to the boss of a shirt company, Jewell agreed to write three chapters of a novel, coaxed into writing them by her close friend, Yasmin Boland, an Australian journalist working then in London. It was Yasmin who stopped her from signing up at a temping agency with the bait of treating her at her favourite restaurant if she finished the first three chapters. The rest is history as, after many rejections (nine out of ten), the manuscript was finally taken on by a publishing agent, and her first novel, Ralph’s Party, was published by Penguin, UK in 1998. It turned out to be a success and Jewell’s life was changed forever. Her story thus emphasises the importance of good friends and the veiled blessings of redundancy.
The Nick Hornby Connection
Jewell admits that when she sat writing her first, she was attempting to write Hornby’s High Fidelity from a female point of view. She felt a girl should be writing a novel like that. Fidelity, she says, was such a smooth read that it made her believe that writing a novel would be quite easy—it was only when she was at the task herself that she realised how foolish was her supposition.
The Method is Missing
Whenever quizzed about her methods, Jewell would only talk about how she makes sure she writes every day—whether at the kitchen table or a small coffee-shop or at an office near to her home (which is a pandemic addition to her life). She hates research because it seems to come in the way of her writing and likes to let her narration flow naturally. Most of her stories have originated from themes and characters rather than the other way round. Ask her about any of her stories and she would tell you how she spotted someone somewhere she wanted to build a story around. She is not a writer who plots a lot in advance but believes in plotting while she is writing.
She swears by Charles Dickens’ novels. In her interviews, she honestly expresses how she is never writing the novel for anyone but herself. She writes exactly what she would love to read, which is perhaps why her stories and themes represent such a tremendous upward graph.
From Chick-lit to Psychological Thrillers
It is no big news that writers and artists don’t like to be pigeonholed but they invariably are. Because of how Jewell’s first few novels were perceived, she was put into the chick-lit box by reviewers and readers. Strangely, her initial novels that passed as light romcoms also had underlying dark themes. She says that she always wanted to write psychological thrillers and crime-fiction but they have seeped into her writing only gradually. Despite her success in the professed rom-com genre, Jewell didn’t like how generic and linear the plot development can be within those boundaries.
“People say 'chick lit' and what they mean is 'crap'. And so even though you might sell 100,000 copies of a book, you're never going to win a prize. These are books that people don't just read, they devour them - they stay up into the early hours because they want to devour them." - Lisa Jewell, The Guardian, 2008
She likes her characters to do what they want to do and follow whatever course they prefer—no matter how absurd that may seem. Jewell shapes enthralling novels around a labyrinth of dark secrets. Her stories are tensely coiled psychological thrillers that steadily build upon suspense. Her storytelling is spotless, usually leaping amid past and present, and the readers are bound to keep moving in and out of characters. Just when you begin to see someone as a sane, sensible person in the story, Jewell throws in their psychopathy, reminding you of the randomness of human nature and your own naivety. The secrecy and intrigue never ebb and the culminations of her stories almost invariably leave you thinking about alternate endings. Her stories stand apart for their sheer smartness and an emotional charge that borders on eeriness. As a teenager, Jewell would devour Agatha Christie books at the library.
Shulph Picks
The Alleged Chick-Lit Novel: Ralph’s Party
It is not always obligatory to reach out for a writer’s first novel when you are new to their fiction. However, the fact that Ralph’s Party was a bestselling debut novel makes it a must-read. Despite claims by many that it fits into the chick-lit box, Jewell has always maintained that Ralph’s Party is not from the genre. The Times review of the book seems to echo Jewell’s sentiments quite aptly: “Lisa Jewell pulls off a rare trick which even the likes of Helen Fielding and Nick Hornby couldn't quite manage. She has written a book about relationships, which appeals in equal measure to men and women.”
Jewell’s first is often liked for being an easy, breezy, unassuming read. The six inhabitants of a house situated at Almanac Road, London are the main characters of this novel. There are flatmates/best-friends falling for the same woman who has just started sharing the space with them. There is also a living-in happily for years couple right across the hall, and an attractive, evil home-breaker living upstairs. The night of Ralph’s party is a crucial night for all of the six characters of the novel—as their destinies are unravelled. It may at first give one the light-hearted feel but in its layers, the novel hides some common issues faced by young people living in large, modern cities.
It explores themes of youthful misperceptions, ungratefulness, isolation, and anguish, and makes a remarkable commentary on the problems of modern relationships, whose subtleties Jewell paints masterfully in her prose. You might like a few characters a little less but they are all bound to leave an imprint on you—making it impossible for you to not empathize.
Ralph's Party can be summed as the story of friendship, youthful aspirations, and love lost and found. The narrative is non-linear, sprinkled richly with plot twists and funny moments. Years later, Jewell felt like exploring what exactly happened to the main couple of the novel, Jem and Ralph, who she left kissing, immersed wholly in romantic love in the nineties. So, she wrote a sequel to this novel; After the Party came out in 2010 and was warmly welcomed by critics and readers. The sequel is focused on the question: what happens to crazy love after marriage, children, and responsibilities come knocking on the door?
Then She Was Gone (2017)
This much-loved novel qualifies both as a psychological suspense and domestic thriller. The author incorporates grief and family complexities as motifs to take us to depths of pain human beings can be forced to live with. Exploring the most natural fear all parents feel, Jewell builds a gut-wrenching story around the life of a fifty-something, divorced woman, Laurel Mack, whose life has been in shambles ever since her youngest child, Ellie, a teenager, went missing ten years ago.
The upshot of this miserable episode has been equally painful. It led to Laurel’s marriage falling apart and her two elder children barely speak to her now. There may be many novels that explore similar themes of missing children and distraught parents but the way Jewell has written Laurel’s character is one of the high points in this story. You don’t even realize when you start feeling one with her. Allowing multiple points of view, different parts of the story are narrated by different characters—giving us a view even inside the head of the story’s villain.
Every day we see news of missing children and their distressed parents looking for them. Jewell encompasses what happens to a family that comes to a standstill when one member goes out of the house to never return. She familiarizes us with the brokenness of a mother who looks for her Ellie in every girl she sees. The account is made effective with flashbacks to the day when Ellie went to the library to never return and is roped tightly to the present moment when Laurel has received confirmation of Ellie’s death from the police, who think Ellie was a runaway. Just when Laurel gets a kind of closure after Ellie’s funeral and decides to move on with her life, the sudden turn in events makes her realize the desired closure is nowhere even near.
The charming Floyd Dunn, the new man in Laurel’s life in whom she begins to feel the hope for a future has a nine-year-old daughter, Poppy, who looks exactly like Ellie. The details from here onward can get too murky for one to handle but you are not going to put it down until you get closure. As Laurel begins to unearth what exactly happened to her Ellie, the facts revealed get increasingly upsetting, alarming—emerging to be much worse than your vilest imagination about what happened to her daughter.
The story explores the devious and abusive side of human nature. It shows us the extent to which the animal in us can stoop for strange, selfish interests and fancies. Some may find the story to be too dark but we cannot deny the presence of such evil people and happenings in different parts of the world. Viewed often as Jewell’s darkest, murkiest story that continually makes you claustrophobic, Then She Was Gone leaves us with a finale that offers both reclamation and peace.
The Family Upstairs (2019)
One of Jewell’s most recent successes, The Family Upstairs is a psychological thriller exploring the journey of a twenty-five-year-old woman who has recently been informed about her inheriting a vast mansion that belonged to her birth-parents—that is now worth a lot of money. Libby was a small baby when her parents were found dead in the large mansion, with her lying upstairs, unharmed. But the story is not that simple. In her inheritance, Libby has received dark lies, secrets, links to siblings she didn’t know existed, mysteries about the crime from years ago, threats from a cult-like society who have been waiting with bated breath for her to come out in the open. The novel is a must-read for its fresh, imaginative intermixing of family secrets and public collusions.
The Family Upstairs pushes the boundaries at several levels. When it starts, it gives one the feeling of reading the familiar classic story wherein a young protagonist is taken by surprise with a large inheritance and the prospects of a transformed life. Just when the reader is about to get snug, Jewell grips them into a web of suspense and thrill with her multi-layered narrative and characters with dark undertones. You will see the story adapting to incorporate essentials from the gothic mystery and domestic crime genres. And if you appreciate writing as a craft, you will respect Jewell for her commitment to detail and scene-setting—for constructing a world that we can all traverse differently. She leaves enough room for several points of view and interpretations as the story is narrated to us by different characters.
With its distinct vibe, personality, and history, even the house in the story feels like one of the characters. In an interview, Jewell talks about how she loves writing about houses and in this novel, she wanted to write about a house where there is a certain level of inconspicuousness and obscurity—where bad things could be happening without anybody outside aware of them.
In its seams the story carries small messages to the reader; it takes our attention to what happens when individual will and choices are destabilized by herd mentality and group ideologies, and to what happens when individuals become victims of sinister groups. It reminds us about the eternal presence of our past in our lives and the real meaning of inheritance, which goes much beyond material wealth.
Written by
Ambika Singh, PhD
Content Manager, Shulph
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