Review: The Family Upstairs

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In ‘The Family Upstairs’ Lisa Jewell has written a deliciously dark and horrifying psychological thriller full of twists and unreliable narrators. I spent large parts of the novel not knowing fully who the characters were and what exactly was happening or where we were going. And it was great.

When Libby turns 25 she inherits a multi-million pound house in London’s affluent Chelsea. She is also told the story of how, as a baby, she was found in the house with the dead bodies of her parents and an unknown man, seemingly cult members, who appeared to have taken their own lives in a suicide pact. Libby discovers that she had siblings, a brother and sister, but no trace of them has been found since.

Meanwhile, in Nice, a down on her luck mother of two, struggling to survive, receives a message that ‘the baby is 25’ and begins to make plans to travel back to London. A first person narrative reveals the story of what happened in the house in the 1980s. There were in fact four children and six adults living in the house in what can only be described as a very non-traditional unit.

Lisa Jewell skilfully and thrillingly weaves these narratives together and we gradually discover what happened in the Chelsea house a quarter of a century ago and the fates of the people who were living in the house. It is a breathless ride, the pages fly by and the shocks keep coming. At no time did I feel that I was being cheated - the reveals arise naturally from the narrative, both in Libby’s investigation into her family history, and in the ‘as it happened’ first person narrative. Highly recommended.


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