I Am Not Done None of This Is True and I Have Thoughts That Cannot Wait

Disclaimer: This is not a review. I have not finished this book. I am writing this from the middle of it, slightly unhinged, with a cold coffee going warm beside me. No spoilers for anything I haven't reached yet — but also, do not come to me with the ending. I am not ready. I will never be ready.

Lisa Jewell wrote a slow burn so slow it takes half the book to realise you're already on fire. A mid-read dispatch from someone who should be sleeping.

There is a specific kind of book that does something quietly sinister in its opening chapters. It does not alarm you. It does not grab you by the collar and announce itself. It simply pulls up a chair, sits across from you, and begins talking in a very normal, pleasant voice while your brain slowly registers that something in the room has changed and you cannot identify what it is or when it happened.

None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell is that book.

I am not done it. I want to be clear about that upfront, both as a disclaimer and as an explanation for why I am writing this at all. I cannot wait until I finish it. I have things to say right now, in this moment, while the tension is still sitting in my chest like a stone I accidentally swallowed. This is less a review and more a dispatch from the middle of a psychological thriller that has been slowly, methodically, and rather brilliantly dismantling my sense of who to trust for the last two hundred pages.

We will do a proper review when I am done. Assuming I survive.

What This Book Is (The Setup, No Spoilers)

Two women. Same birthday. Same pub. Same night.

Alix Summer is a true crime podcaster — successful, polished, the kind of woman whose life looks assembled rather than lived in. Josie Fair is none of those things. She is quiet, unremarkable, slightly off in a way you cannot immediately name. She tells Alix she has a story to tell. She tells Alix she is on the cusp of great changes. She tells Alix she would be the perfect subject for her next podcast series.

Alix, who is a journalist and therefore constitutionally incapable of leaving a story alone, agrees.

This is, as you may have already gathered from the title of the book, a decision that does not go well.

Josie's life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can't quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realise that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix's life — and into her home.

That last part — into her home — is where I currently am, and I need you to understand that every page of it is deeply uncomfortable in a way that is completely deliberate and completely effective. Lisa Jewell knows exactly what she is doing. She is doing it to us on purpose. We are not victims. We are willing participants. This is somehow worse.

The Slow Burn, Explained for People Who Almost Put It Down in Chapter Three

I understand the impulse. The first quarter of this book is not fast. It is not packed with incident. It is Alix and Josie having conversations, Josie's life being gradually revealed in pieces, and a low-grade sense of wrongness that hums underneath every scene without ever resolving into anything you can point at.

This is the whole mechanism of the book and it is brilliant and I did not fully appreciate it until I was deep enough in to see what Jewell was building. The beginning builds character and atmosphere, but the pace accelerates dramatically in the second half, becoming unputdownable. The shift from a slow-burn character study to a full-throttle thriller is seamless.

What she is doing in those early chapters is training you. She is teaching you how Josie moves — the specific texture of her, the way she presents herself, the gap between what she says and what sits just beneath it. She is building your instincts about this woman so that when those instincts are confirmed, and then subverted, and then confirmed again in a different way, you feel it in your body and not just your brain.

It starts slow but the sinister feeling tingles beneath your neck, warning you bad things are about to come — and sooner, all hell breaks loose. It's like listening to a concerto that slowly raises its tempo, and as you reach the ending, you hear the crescendo.

I am not at the crescendo yet. I am at the part where the tempo is unmistakably rising and I keep reading one more chapter telling myself it's fine and it is absolutely not fine.

On Josie Fair, Who Is a Lot

Josie is the kind of character who would register immediately as a red flag in real life and whom you would clock within minutes of meeting. She is too eager. Too interested. Too available. She mirrors Alix's energy back at her with just enough delay that it reads as admiration rather than calculation — and it is only because you are reading a psychological thriller that you see it for what it is. In real life, you might not.

That is the uncomfortable truth at the centre of this book. The reason Josie gets as far as she does is not because Alix is naive. It is because Josie is very good at this — and because the qualities that make Alix good at her job (curiosity, openness, the inability to leave a story unfinished) are also the qualities that make her vulnerable to someone who knows how to exploit them.

If you have ever read anything we've written about how emotional predators actually operate — the mirroring, the gradual boundary erosion, the way they make you feel responsible for their wellbeing before you've noticed the shift — Josie Fair is a case study. She is fiction, but she is not invented. People like this exist. They are just rarely this well-written.

The Podcast Structure Is Doing A Lot of Heavy Lifting

Jewell structures the book as a kind of true crime documentary — alternating between present-tense narrative and interview excerpts from the podcast, interspersed with witness accounts and outside perspectives that slowly fill in what the main narrative withholds. It is a format that works on two levels simultaneously: it tells you something is going to go very wrong (because why else would there be a documentary) while keeping you in the dark about exactly what and exactly how.

Jewell intentionally wants readers to feel unmoored, especially considering the title of the book, because it's preparing us for some major twists or lies to be revealed, so we are constantly on edge.

The title is doing enormous work. None of This Is True is both a statement about the story and an instruction to the reader — do not get comfortable with what you think you know, because the ground is being moved under you at all times and you will only notice it has shifted after the fact. I have noticed it shifting. I am still reading. I have been emotionally outwitted by a Lisa Jewell novel and I am not even embarrassed about it.

This sits neatly alongside our The Housemaid comparison piece as further evidence that the domestic thriller genre, when done properly, is doing something genuinely interesting about women, power, and the particular violence of being underestimated. Josie is underestimated. Alix underestimates her. The reader underestimates her. That is the engine of the whole thing.

Where I Am and What I Need You to Know

I am close to the end. I can feel it in the way the chapters have shortened and the sentences have gotten tighter and Jewell is rationing information the way you ration the last of something good. Every answer she gives me opens two more questions. Every scene I think I understand reveals a layer I missed the first time.

I do not know how this ends. I have theories. I am not sharing them here because putting them in writing makes them feel too real and I am not ready to be wrong in public.

What I can tell you is this: if you are a person who reads thrillers and you have not read this one, you are doing yourself a disservice. If you started it and found the opening slow, go back. The slow is the point. The slow is the whole setup for everything that follows. It doesn't have quite the same wild twists and turns that some mystery-suspense novels do, but it definitely has a few good tricks up its sleeve — and mostly you will find yourself riveted by the story the whole way through.

And if you have read it and you know how it ends: say nothing. I am almost there. I will be back with a full review, a dramatic conclusion, and whatever emotional wreckage Lisa Jewell has left me in.

For now I am going to go finish this book instead of writing about it.

— BrewtifulLiving.com | Brutal truths, Brewtifully packaged.