The Family Upstairs, by Lisa Jewell

This book is so mysterious and twisty, I loved it so much! It’s about a healthy baby who is found alone in a house with three decomposing corpses and no one else around - and the mystery of who the bodies are, how they died, and who has been looking after the baby!

The story follows three adults 25 years later as they retell the story of the events in the house, and how their lives have been deeply impacted by the events in their childhood. The story line hops between the three of them with a mixture of third and first person.

There are some fantastic twists and unreliable narrators leaving out very important bits of information, and it plays with how you feel towards many of the characters!

Despite some pretty evil and twisted people and events, there are some lovely wholesome characters and themes in the book.

How dyslexia-friendly is it?

For the first 50ish pages, I had to make notes to keep track of character names and relations to each other because right at the beginning quite a lot of new characters are introduced quickly and I kept forgetting names and who was who. But it does keep returning to the same three main characters, and you pick it up after a while. The font in my edition was nice and large, and the writing style I found very easy to read and get into, again, I found this book to be quite like watching a movie and effortless to picture the characters and the surroundings!

The last page ends on another great twist, and I was so excited to see that in 2022 a sequel is going to be released!! I can’t wait to read more by Lisa Jewell.