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. It’s getting to the point that every single year @lisajewelluk is on my top 10 of the year… sometimes multiple times!! This year is going to be no different!!! She killed it!! 👏👏👏 Perhaps her best yet!!! 🤫😍 Q: Were there any plot and character revelations you were especially excited to finally give the reader? Interestingly, I do, and it’s fellow author and good friend, Louise Candlish. We were both flabbergasted when we made the discovery, it seemed extraordinary to us that we’d both come into the world on the same day and ended up doing the same job in the same very small orbit. Louise is a woman I feel a very strong bond with, although we don’t see each other much, I absolutely get her, and she makes total sense to me. So the impetus for using birthday twins as an opening into the novel definitely did not spring from my own experience. Instead it seemed an ideal opportunity to show how divergent women’s lives can be in spite of similar beginnings. It means she’s wrong, that everything, literally everything, about her is wrong and that she’s running out of time to make herself right.

As the story progresses, it's like a veil being pulled from your eyes, but I still couldn't believe what I was reading. It was so twisted! Consider how the book’s title influenced your perception of events and characters. What elements were you suspicious of from the start because of the title?Overall, I am not as enthusiastic about this thriller as I had hoped to be. I’m still a fan of Jewell and will gladly read her next thriller. Lots of short, punchy chapters, interspersed with a Netflix documentary and podcast extracts, all make for a very fast-paced read. You know bad shit has happened from the start, maybe reeeaaaaalllly bad shit, but I didn't have a clue what, exactly, had gone down, and I was desperate to find out.

Alix and Nathan both tell Josie that she will have to leave their house, as Alix’s sisters are coming to stay. Josie does not take the news well, but does eventually leave. That said, this game of cat and mouse was such a deviously delightful read that I can’t help but highly recommend it for your 2022 TBR. While not my favorite Lisa Jewell novel, it is an immensely enjoyable read that will be a fantastic book club choice, brimming with copious discussion material.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for sharing this brilliant novels of digital copy in exchange my honest thoughts. SE: I had a hard time letting go of these characters, which to me is a sign of a great book. Do you feel that way when you write a novel? Is it hard for you to let go? Or are you just done? This story follows two women, Alix Summers, a popular podcaster, and Josie Fair, an unassuming woman, whose profession is so inconsequential, I can't recall it. All things said, Jewell did a great job with this and the audio production was top notch. I recommend this to anyone who likes a solid suspenseful psychological thriller/mystery! Alix’s life and marriage is far from perfect, and Josie likes to call her out on the situation. By the time Alix feels unease, Josie has wormed her way into Alix’s life and home, with repercussions that are unforeseeable and devastating.

Her first novel, Ralph's Party, was the best- selling debut novel of 1999. Since then she has written another twenty novels, most recently a number of dark psychological thrillers, including The Girls, Then She Was Gone, The Family Upstairs and The Night She Disappeared. What about a shared birthday might make you feel bonded to someone? Would you feel a sense of connection and intrigue the way Josie and Alix do? Why do you think Josie imbues this relatively ordinary coincidence with so much importance and meaning? My work colleagues might fight me on this one on Monday 🤭 was the premise good? yes, very good actually. It was new and fun and twisty and I loved it.LJ: I had no idea when I started writing the book what Josie was going to unveil. I didn’t know what her story was going to be. I just knew that I was going to have to come to my computer every day and write a chapter or write 1,000 words, and that was going to move the plot along, and that was going to help me find out more about what it was that Josie really wanted to talk to Alix about. Because the initial moment of connection is Josie basically saying to Alix, “I need to talk to you about my life.” I didn’t know what Josie’s life was. I just knew she had this husband, a bit older than her, sitting by the window staring at his laptop, and a kid in a room gaming. Some people could read the ending to be ambiguous or open; a lot of people have read it as I intended it to be — not ambiguous or open — which is Josie finally confronting the truth in her head of what actually happened. But I didn’t work out until a long time after I’d written the book precisely what Josie was hiding, and what was true and what wasn’t. And then to realize, weeks after writing the book, that it was all in there. I put it all in there without really knowing what it was while I was writing it.