Start Reading Lisa Jewell’s New Book ‘The Family Upstairs’ Right Now

Each month, the Bustle Book Club asks an author to recommend a book they think everyone should read. In November, The Turn of the Key author Ruth Ware recommends The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell. The follow is an excerpt from the novel, out on Nov. 5, 2019 and available to order now. (An audiobook excerpt is also available below.) In this shocking story, a young woman turns 25, discovers the identity of her birth parents, and learns that she has inherited their posh London mansion. But she doesn’t know that 25 years earlier, a tragedy occurred within the walls of her inheritance: Police arrived to find three people dead, four children missing, and a baby alone in a crib. The novel is narrated by three people impacted by the events of that night. Start reading the prologue, chapter one, and chapter two below.

Prologue

It would be inaccurate to say that my childhood was normal before they came. It was far from normal, but it felt normal because it was all I’d known. It’s only now, with decades of hindsight, that I can see how odd it was.

I was nearly eleven when they came, and my sister was nine. They lived with us for more than five years and they turned everything very, very dark. My sister and I had to learn how to survive.

And when I was sixteen, and my sister was fourteen, the baby came.

Chapter One

Libby picks up the letter off the doormat. She turns it in her hands. It looks very formal; the envelope is cream in color, made of high-grade paper, and feels as though it might even be lined with tissue. The postal frank says: “Smithkin Rudd & Royle Solicitors, Chelsea Manor Street, SW3.”

She takes the letter into the kitchen and sits it on the table while she fills the kettle and puts a tea bag in a mug. Libby is pretty sure she knows what’s in the envelope. She turned twenty-five last month. She’s been subconsciously waiting for this envelope. But now that it’s here she’s not sure she can face opening it.

She picks up her phone and calls her mother. “Mum,” she says. “It’s here. The letter from the trustees.” She hears a silence at the other end of the line. She pictures her mum in her own kitchen, a thousand miles away in Dénia: pristine white units, lime-green color-coordinated kitchen accessories, sliding glass doors onto a small terrace with a distant view to the Mediterranean, her phone held to her ear in the crystal-studded case that she refers to as her bling.

You can also listen to the audiobook excerpt of this passage.

“Oh,” she says. “Right. Gosh. Have you opened it?”

“No. Not yet. I’m just having a cup of tea first.”

“Right,” she says again. Then she says, “Shall I stay on the line? While you do it?”

“Yes,” says Libby. “Please.”

She feels a little breathless, as she sometimes does when she’s just about to stand up and give a sales presentation at work, like she’s had a strong coffee. She takes the tea bag out of the mug and sits down. Her fingers caress the corner of the envelope and she inhales.

“OK,” she says to her mother, “I’m doing it. I’m doing it right now.”

Her mum knows what’s in here. Or at least she has an idea, though she was never told formally what was in the trust. It might, as she has always said, be a teapot and a ten-pound note. Libby clears her throat and slides her finger under the flap. She pulls out a sheet of thick cream paper and scans it quickly:

She puts down the covering letter and pulls out the accompanying paperwork.

“Well?” says her mum, breathlessly. “Still reading,” she replies. She skims and her eye is caught by the name of a property. Sixteen Cheyne Walk, SW3. She assumes it is the property her birth parents were living in when they died. She knows it was in Chelsea. She knows it was big. She assumed it was long gone. Boarded up. Sold. Her breath catches hard at the back of her throat when she realizes what she’s just read.

“Er,” she says. “What?”

“It looks like . . . No, that can’t be right.”

“What!”

“The house. They’ve left me the house.”

“The Chelsea house?”

“Yes,” she says.

“The whole house?”

“I think so.”

There’s a covering letter, something about nobody else named on the trust coming forward in due time. She can’t digest it at all.

“My God. I mean, that must be worth . . .” Libby breathes in sharply and raises her gaze to the ceiling. “This must be wrong,” she says. “This must be a mistake.”

“Go and see the solicitors,” says her mother. “Call them. Make an appointment. Make sure it’s not a mistake.”

“But what if it’s not a mistake? What if it’s true?”

“Well then, my angel,” says her mother — and Libby can hear her smile from all these miles away — “you’ll be a very rich woman indeed.”

Libby ends the call and stares around her kitchen. Five minutes ago, this kitchen was the only kitchen she could afford, this flat the only one she could buy, here in this quiet street of terraced cottages in the backwaters of St. Albans. She remembers the flats and houses she saw during her online searches, the little intakes of breath as her eye caught upon the perfect place — a sun-trap terrace, an eat-in kitchen, a five-minute walk to the station, a bulge of ancient leaded windows, the suggestion of cathedral bells from across a green — and then she would see the price and feel herself a fool for ever thinking it might be for her.

She compromised on everything in the end to find a place that was close to her job and not too far from the train station. There was no gut instinct as she stepped across the threshold; her heart said nothing to her as the estate agent showed her around. But she made it a home to be proud of, painstakingly creaming off the best that T.J. Maxx had to offer, and now her badly converted, slightly awkward one-bedroom flat makes her feel happy. She bought it; she adorned it. It belongs to her.

But now it appears she is the owner of a house on the finest street in Chelsea and suddenly her flat looks like a ridiculous joke. Everything that was important to her five minutes ago feels like a joke — the £1,500-a-year raise she was just awarded at work, the hen weekend in Barcelona next month that took her six months to save for, the MAC eye shadow she “allowed” herself to buy last weekend as a treat for getting the pay raise, the soft frisson of abandoning her tightly managed monthly budget for just one glossy, sweet-smelling moment in House of Fraser, the weightlessness of the tiny MAC bag swinging from her hand, the shiver of placing the little black capsule in her makeup bag, of knowing that she owned it, that she might in fact wear it in Barcelona, where she might also wear the dress her mother bought her for Christmas, the one from French Connection with the lace panels she’d wanted for ages. Five minutes ago her joys in life were small, anticipated, longed-for, hard-earned and saved-up-for, inconsequential little splurges that meant nothing in the scheme of things but gave the flat surface of her life enough sparkles to make it worth getting out of bed every morning to go and do a job which she liked but didn’t love.

Now she owns a house in Chelsea and the proportions of her existence have been blown apart.

She slides the letter back into its expensive envelope and finishes her tea.

Chapter Two

There is a storm brewing over the Côte d’Azur; it sits dark as damsons on the horizon, lying heavy on the crown of Lucy’s head. She cups her skull with one hand, grabs her daughter’s empty plate with the other, and lowers it to the ground so that the dog can lick off the gravy stains and crumbs of chicken.

“Marco,” she says to her son, “finish your food.”

“I’m not hungry,” he replies.

Lucy feels rage pulse and throb at her temples. The storm is edging closer; she can feel the moisture cooling in the hot air. “This is it,” she says, her voice clipped with the effort of not shouting. “This is all there is to eat today. This is the end of the money. No more. No telling me you’re hungry at bedtime. It’ll be too late then. Eat it. Please.”

Marco shakes his head long-sufferingly and cuts into his chicken schnitzel. She stares at the top of his head, the thick chestnut hair swirling from a double crown. She tries to remember the last time they all washed their hair and she can’t.

Stella says, “Mama, can I have a dessert?” Lucy glances down at her. Stella is five years old and the best mistake Lucy ever made. She should say no; she’s so hard on Marco, she should not be so soft on his sister. But Stella is so good, so yielding and easy. How can she deny her something sweet to eat?

“If Marco finishes his schnitzel,” she says evenly, “we can get an ice cream to share.”

This is clearly unfair on Stella, who finished her chicken ten minutes ago and shouldn’t have to wait for her brother to finish his. But Stella’s sense of injustice seems still to be unformed and she nods and says, “Eat quickly, Marco!”

Lucy takes Marco’s plate from him when he is done and puts it on the pavement for the dog. The ice cream comes. It is three flavors in a glass bowl with hot chocolate sauce, crumbled praline, and a pink foil palm tree on a cocktail stick.

Lucy’s head throbs again and she eyes the horizon. They need to find shelter and they need to do it soon. She asks for the bill, places her card on the saucer, and taps her number into the card reader, her breath held against the knowledge that now there is no money in that account, that there is no money anywhere.

She waits while Stella licks out the glass bowl, then she unties the dog’s lead from the table leg and collects their bags, handing two to Marco, one to Stella.

“Where are we going?” asks Marco. His brown eyes are serious; his gaze is heavy with anxiety. She sighs. She looks up the street toward Nice’s Old Town, down the street toward the ocean. She even looks at the dog, as though he might have a good suggestion to make. He looks at her eagerly, as though there might be another plate to lick. There’s only one place to go and it’s the last place she wants to be. But she finds a smile.

“I know,” she says, “let’s go and see Mémé!” Marco groans. Stella looks uncertain. They both remember how it was last time they stayed with Stella’s grandmother. Samia was once a film star in Algeria. Now she is seventy years old, blind in one eye, and living in a scruffy seventh-floor apartment in a tower block in l’Ariane with her disabled adult daughter. Her husband died when she was just fifty-five and her only son, Stella’s father, disappeared three years ago and hasn’t been in touch since. Samia is angry and raw and rightly so. But she has a roof and a floor; she has pillows and running water. She has everything right now that Lucy can’t offer her children. “Just for one night,” she says. “Just tonight and then I’ll sort something out for tomorrow. I promise.”

They reach Samia’s building just as the rain starts to fall, tiny water bombs exploding on the hot pavement. In the graffiti- daubed lift on the way to the seventh floor, Lucy can smell them: the humid aroma of unwashed clothes, of greasy hair, of trainers that have been worn too long. The dog, with his coat of dense wiry hair, smells particularly horrible.

“I can’t,” says Samia at her front door, blocking their entrance. “I just can’t. Mazie is sick. The carer needs to sleep here tonight. There is no room. There is just no room.”

A crack of thunder booms overhead. The sky behind them turns brilliant white. Sheets of rain sluice from the sky. Lucy stares at Samia desperately. “We have nowhere else to go,” she says.“I know,” says Samia. “I know that. I can take Stella. But you and the boy and the dog, I’m sorry. You’ll have to find somewhere else.”

Lucy feels Stella push against her leg, a shiver of unease running through her small body. “I want to stay with you,” she whispers to Lucy. “I don’t want to stay without you.”

Lucy crouches down and takes Stella’s hands. Stella’s eyes are green, like her father’s; her dark hair is streaked hazel-blond, her face tanned dark brown from the long hot summer. She is a beautiful child; people stop Lucy on the street sometimes to tell her so, with a soft gasp.

“Baby,” she says. “You’ll be dry here. You can have a shower; Mémé will read you a story…"

Samia nods. “I’ll read you the one you like,” she says, “about the moon.”

Stella presses herself tighter against Lucy. Lucy feels her patience ebbing. She would give anything to be allowed to sleep in Mémé’s bed, to be read the book about the moon, to shower and slip into clean pajamas.

“Just one night, baby. I’ll be here first thing tomorrow to collect you. OK?”

She feels the flutter of Stella’s head nodding against her shoulder, the intake of her breath against tears. “OK, Mama,” says Stella, and Lucy bundles her into Samia’s flat before either of them can change their mind. Then it is just her and Marco and the dog, yoga mats rolled up on their backs, heading into the heavy rain, into the darkening night, with nowhere to go.

For a while they take shelter beneath the flyover. The constant fizz of car tires over hot wet tarmac is deafening. The rain keeps falling.

Marco has the dog held in his lap, his face pressed against the dog’s back.

He looks up at Lucy. “Why is our life so shit?” he asks.

“You know why our life is shit,” she snaps.

“But why can’t you do something about it?”

“I’m trying,” she says.

“No you’re not. You’re letting us go under.”

“I am trying,” she hisses, fixing him with a furious gaze. “Every single minute of every single day.”

He looks at her doubtfully. He is too, too clever and knows her too, too well. She sighs. “I’ll get my fiddle back tomorrow. I can start making money again.”

“How are you going to pay for the repairs?” He narrows his eyes at her.

“I’ll find a way.”

“What way?”

“I don’t know, all right? I don’t know. Something will come up. It always does.”

She turns from her son then and stares into the parallel lines of headlights burning toward her. A huge cannon of thunder explodes overhead, the sky lights up again, the rain becomes, if it is possible, even heavier. She pulls her battered smartphone from the outside pocket of her rucksack, turns it on. She sees that she has 8 percent battery charge left and is about to switch it off again when she notices her phone has sent her a notification from her calendar. It’s been there for weeks now but she can’t bring herself to cancel it.

It says, simply: "The baby is 25."

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell is being published on Nov. 5, 2019 by Simon & Schuster. You can now order the book or order the audiobook.

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