I Found You: A Novel

by Lisa Jewell Narrated by Helen Duff

Overview

In a windswept British seaside town, single mum Alice Lake finds a man sitting on the beach outside her house. He has no name and no idea how he got there. Against her better judgment, she invites him inside. Meanwhile, in a suburb of London, twenty-one-year-old Lily Monrose has only been married for three weeks. When her husband fails to come home from work one night, she is left alone in a place where she knows no one and with the police telling her that her husband never existed. In this suspenseful drama, both women must sort through the secrets surrounding men neither of them knows if they can trust.

Editorial Reviews

Midwest Book Review

Jewell is a genuinely original and skilled novelist with an impressive flair for deftly crafted narratives and surprising plot development.

Required Reading column New York Post

"Jewell keeps the reader guessing."

New York Times Book Review

How [the] plots intersect and finally collide is one of the great thrills of reading Jewell’s book. She ratchets up the tension masterfully, and her writing is lively.

Booklist

The structure keeps the suspense level high, and Jewell manages surprising revelations all the way up to the ending. The mix of women’s fiction and suspense—plus a no-nonsense 40-something heroine at the heart of the story—makes this a good fit for fans of Liane Moriarty.

RT Book Reviews

"One word: wow! This latest offering from Jewell starts off strong and keeps readers riveted until the very last word...this book is ‘unreliable narrator’ at its best!"

Shelf Awareness (starred review)

Praise for I Found You:

“Lisa Jewell is a brilliant storyteller, creating suspenseful yet believable novels time and again. I Found You is no exception—filled with intriguing characters connected in startling ways. Quickly paced yet delicately nuanced, this novel is sure to appeal to fans of Big Little Lies and The Woman in Cabin 10.

Toronto Star

"Crackling suspense...Among the year’s best domestic thrillers."

The Globe and Mail

“There will be tendencies to compare this book to The Girl On The Train and its various imitators, but don’t be fooled: This is better than those. Jewell’s forte is the good old-fashioned novel of psychological suspense, the kind that keeps you reading deep into the night.

Booklist

The structure keeps the suspense level high, and Jewell manages surprising revelations all the way up to the ending. The mix of women’s fiction and suspense—plus a no-nonsense 40-something heroine at the heart of the story—makes this a good fit for fans of Liane Moriarty.

Womans Day

A suspenseful mystery.

RT Magazine

"Jewell pens a psychological thriller that leaves readers wondering if they really know all the answers. Children can be more frightening than adults, as she demonstrates in her brilliant portrayal of youthful deceit and jealousy. Each individual is vividly described and counterbalanced by their strengths and weaknesses."

London Daily Mail

Another winner. Beautiful writing, believable characters, a pacy narrative and dark secrets combine to make this a gripping read.

Shelf Awareness

Jewell does a beautiful job of creating large companies of detailed and believable characters in her novels. Some are likable, some are not, and Jewell carefully explores what makes each of them tick, from the unstable to the overachievers to those in search of love... a delicate exploration of teenage love and rivalry, mental illness and how far people will go to protect those they care about. Fans of Liane Moriarty and JoJo Moyes will love The Girls in the Garden, as will anyone who remembers the angst and ecstasy of being a teenager.

Rachel Hore

Lisa creates beguiling characters, which dazzle from the page. This is a terrific suspense story told with that brooding promise of danger that taunts us to read on, to chase the elusive truth at the heart of the book.

Tamar Cohen

Oh but I loved this book – a magical garden right in the center of the city, a long, hot summer simmering away, a group of young teens, lurching between boredom and passion and ripe for their lives to start. And at its center a dark and disturbing mystery that keeps you turning the pages long into the night. Lisa Jewell is the most compassionate storyteller. She writes with such lightness of touch, yet her books pack a powerful punch. A stunning, beautiful, mesmerizing book that everyone will be reading this summer.

Jane Fallon

An engaging and atmospheric read, Lisa beautifully conjures up the half-child half-adult lives of young teenagers.

Seattle Times

"The writing is cause for pleasant pause."

Manhattan Book Review

An intoxicating, spellbinding read that will make readers entranced with Lisa Jewell’s wicked and gorgeous prose…raw, intense, gritty, dark and suspenseful. If you are looking for a looking for a psychological thriller that will unfold secrets and truths in a shocking manner, this book is for you.

Fort-Worth Star Telegram

Jewell expertly mines the relationships of her compelling, multilayered characters for a perfect pack-for-vacation read.

People

Jewell expertly builds suspense by piling up domestic misunderstandings and more plot twists than an SVU episode. It’s a page-turner for readers who like beach reads on the dark side.

Jojo Moyes

Praise for The Girls in the Garden:

“Lisa Jewell’s characters are so real that I finish every book half-expecting to bump into one of them. Modern, complex, intuitive, she just goes from strength to strength.

From the Publisher

One of New York Post’s “Buzziest Books to Bring to the Beach

Booklist (starred review)

Full of suspense yet emotionally grounded…Fans of Liane Moriarty, Paula Hawkins, and Carla Buckley will adore this peek inside a gated community that truly takes care of its own, no matter the consequences.

Library Journal

★ 02/15/2017
In a windswept British seaside town, single mom Alice encounters a man sitting on the beach near her home. The lightly dressed stranger has no idea how he got there and recalls nothing of himself. A standard opening for an amnesiac tale right? Against her better judgment, Alice invites him inside. Here begins an intriguing story of a young bride, a lonely single mother, and perhaps a murder that happened decades earlier. Drawn to this visitor, Alice has mixed feelings about his memory returning, but as the days go by, the man gets disturbing flashes of his former self. Meanwhile, in London, newlywed Lily frantically searches for her husband, who fails to come home one evening, but the clues she finds make her second guess her marriage. As the mysterious man, "Gray," peels back his clouded memory, a thoroughly compelling story unfolds. Who is he? What happened at this seaside town in his teenage years? VERDICT Jewell (The Girls in the Garden) is a wonderful storyteller. Her characters are believable, her writing is strong and poetic, and her narrative is infused with just enough intrigue to keep the pages turning. Readers of Liane Moriarty, Paula Hawkins, and Ruth Ware will love. [See Prepub Alert, 10/31/16.]—Susan Clifford Braun, Bainbridge Island, WA

Kirkus Reviews

2017-02-02
Three lonely people meet when their lives are in upheaval and learn they are also connected by a haunting 20-year-old mystery.Single mother Alice offers a stranger sitting on the beach in the rain a windbreaker, and, upon learning he has no recollection of who he is or how he got there, she invites him to stay in her guesthouse. Her children give him the name Frank, and Alice works to help him regain his memory and learn how he ended up in the north of England. Near London, Lily, a young wife from the Ukraine who has been living in England with her new husband, panics when he fails to return home. After the local police inform Lily his passport is fake, she begins to search for him to determine whom she married and why he suddenly abandoned her. These two stories set in present-day Britain are interwoven with a third story set in 1993 of a family's annual vacation to the beach, which takes a troubling and ominous turn after the 15-year-old daughter, Kirsty, begins dating a local 19-year-old guy, Mark. As Jewell's (The Girls in the Garden, 2016, etc.) novel progresses, the tensions in each story heighten as the characters must confront questions of whether we ever truly know other people or if we always keep part of ourselves hidden away. While these are not new questions, Jewell's page-turner approaches them in a riveting manner. Its numerous twists avoid predictability, and the novel is well-paced as it weaves the three narratives together. Toward the end of the novel, as Alice, Frank, and Lily meet and begin to learn who has brought them together, the plot moves a bit too quickly for a full explanation of everyone's identity and motivations. Yet even these too-short character back stories serve to circle back and reinforce the novel's central question: how much does knowing a person in the present count for? Dark and moody, this is a mystery with substance.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175516099
Publisher:	Dreamscape Media
Publication date:	04/25/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	331,988

Read an Excerpt

I Found You


Alice Lake lives in a house by the sea. It is a tiny house, a coast guard’s cottage, built more than three hundred years ago for people much smaller than her. The ceilings slope and bulge and her fourteen-year-old son needs to bow his head to get through the front door. They were all so little when she moved them here from London six years ago. Jasmine was ten. Kai was eight. And Romaine, the baby, was just four months old. She hadn’t imagined that one day she’d have a gangling child of almost six foot. She hadn’t imagined that they’d ever outgrow this place.

Alice sits in her tiny room at the top of her tiny house. From here she runs her business. She makes art from old maps which she sells on the Internet for silly money. Silly money for a piece of art made from old maps, perhaps, but not silly money for a single mother of three. She sells a couple a week. It’s enough, just about.

Beyond her window, between Victorian streetlights, a string of sun-faded bunting swings back and forth in the boisterous April wind. To the left there is a slipway where small fishing boats form a colorful spine down to a concrete jetty and where the great, dreadful froth of the North Sea hits the rocky shoreline. And beyond that the sea. Black and infinite. Alice still feels awed by the sea, by its vast proximity. In Brixton, where she lived before, she had a view of walls, of other people’s gardens, of distant towers and fumy skies. And suddenly, overnight, there was all this sea. When she sits on the sofa on the other side of the room it is all she can see, as though it is a part of the room, as though it is about to seep through the window frames and drown them all.

She brings her gaze back to the screen of her iPad. On it she can see a small square room, a cat sitting on a green sofa licking its haunches, a pot of tea on the coffee table. She can hear voices from elsewhere, her mother talking to the carer. Her father talking to her mother. She can’t quite hear what they’re saying because the microphone on the webcam she set up in their living room last time she visited doesn’t pick up sound properly in other rooms. But Alice is reassured that the carer is there, that her parents will be fed and medicated, washed and dressed, and that for an hour or two she won’t need to worry about them.

That’s another thing she hadn’t imagined when she’d moved north six years ago. That her spry, clever, just-turned-seventy-year-old parents would both develop Alzheimer’s within weeks of each other and require constant supervision and care.

On the screen on Alice’s laptop is an order form from a man called Max Fitzgibbon. He wants a rose made out of maps of Cumbria, Chelsea, and Saint-Tropez for his wife’s fiftieth birthday. Alice can picture the man: well-preserved, silver-haired, in a heather-colored Joules zip-neck sweater, still hopelessly in love with his wife after twenty-five years of marriage. She can tell all this from his name, his address, from his choice of gift (“big blowsy English roses have always been her favorite flower,” he says in the “any other comments” box).

Alice looks up from her screen and down through her window. He is still there. The man on the beach.

He’s been there all day, since she opened her curtains at seven o’clock this morning, sitting on the damp sand, his arms around his knees, staring and staring out to sea. She’s kept an eye on him, concerned that he might be about to top himself. That had happened once before. A young man, deathly pale in the blue-white moonlight, had left his coat on the beach and just disappeared. Alice is still haunted by the thought of him, three years later.

But this man doesn’t move. He just sits and stares. The air today is cold and blowing in hard, bringing with it a veil of icy droplets from the surface of the sea. But the man is wearing only a shirt and jeans. No jacket. No bag. No hat or scarf. There’s something worrying about him; not quite scruffy enough to be a drifter, not quite strange enough to be a mental health patient from the day care center in town. He looks too healthy to be a junkie and he hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol. He just looks . . . Alice searches her mind for the right word and then it comes to her. He looks lost.



An hour later the rain comes down. Alice peers through the spattered windowpanes and down to the beach below. He’s still there. His brown hair is stuck to his skull and his shoulders and sleeves are dark with water. In half an hour she needs to collect Romaine from school. She makes a split-second decision.

“Hero!” she calls to the brindle Staffy.

“Sadie!” she calls to the ancient poodle.

“Griff!” she calls to the greyhound. “Walkies!”

Alice has three dogs. Griff, the greyhound, is the only one she deliberately went out and chose. The poodle is her parents’. She is eighteen years old and should be dead by rights. Half her fur is gone and her legs are bald and thin as birds’ but she still insists on joining the other dogs for a walk. And Hero, the Staffy, belonged to Barry, a man who’d rented her shed from her a while back. He disappeared one day and left everything behind, including his mental dog. Hero has to wear a muzzle on the street; otherwise she attacks prams and scooters.

Alice clips their leads to their collars as they circle her ankles and notices something else that Barry left behind in his midnight flit, hanging from the coat hooks next to the leads. A shabby old jacket. She automatically wrinkles her nose at the sight of it. She once slept with Barry in a moment of sheer stupidity—and intense loneliness—and regretted it from the moment he lay down on top of her and she realized that he smelled of cheese. That it emanated from every crevice of his slightly lardy body. She’d held her breath and got on with it but ever after she associated him with that smell.

She plucks the jacket gingerly from the peg and drapes it over her arm. Then she takes the dogs and an umbrella and heads toward the beach.



“Here,” she says, passing the coat to the man. “It’s a bit smelly but it’s waterproof. And look, it has a hood.”

The man turns slowly and looks at her.

He doesn’t seem to have registered her intention, so she babbles.

“It belonged to Barry. Ex-lodger. He was about the same size as you. But you smell better. Well, not that I can tell from here. But you look like you smell nice.”

The man looks at Alice and then down at the jacket.

“Well,” she says, “do you want it?”

Still no response.

“Look. I’m just going to leave it here with you. I don’t need it and I don’t want it and you may as well keep it. Even if you just use it to sit on. Shove it in a bin if you like.”

She drops it near his feet and straightens herself up. His eyes follow her.

“Thank you.”

“Ah, so you do talk?”

He looks surprised. “Of course I talk.”

He has a southern accent. His eyes are the same shade of ginger brown as his hair and the stubble on his chin. He’s handsome. If you like that kind of thing.

“Good,” she says, putting her free hand into her pocket, the other grasping the handle of her umbrella. “Glad to hear it.”

He smiles and clutches the damp jacket in his fist. “You sure?”

“About that?” She eyes the jacket. “You’d be doing me a favor. Seriously.”

He pulls the jacket on over his wet clothes and fiddles with the zip for a while before fastening it. “Thank you,” he says again. “Really.”

Alice turns to check the locations of the dogs. Sadie sits thin and damp by her feet; the other two are scampering at the water’s edge. Then she turns back to the man. “Why don’t you get indoors, out of this rain?” she asks. “Forecast says it’s set to rain till tomorrow morning. You’re going to make yourself ill.”

“Who are you?” he asks, his eyes narrowed, as though she’d introduced herself already and he’d momentarily forgotten her name.

“I’m Alice. You don’t know me.”

“No,” he says. “I don’t.” He appears reassured by this.

“Anyway,” says Alice, “I’d better get on.”

“Sure.”

Alice takes up the slack in Sadie’s lead and the poodle gets unsteadily to her feet, like a freshly birthed giraffe.

She calls for the other two. They ignore her. She tuts and calls again.

“Bloody idiots,” she mutters under her breath. “Come on!” she yells, striding toward them. “Get here now!”

They are both in and out of the sea. Hero is covered in a layer of green-hued mulch. They will stink. And it is nearly time to collect Romaine. She can’t be late again. She’d been late yesterday because she’d overrun on a piece of work, forgotten the time, and at 3:50 had to retrieve Romaine from the school office, where the secretary had looked at her over the top of the desk screen as though she were a stain on the carpet.

“Come on, you shitbags!” She strides across the beach and makes a grab for Griff. Griff thinks a game has been suggested and darts playfully away. She goes after Hero, who runs away from her. Meanwhile poor Sadie is being dragged about by her scrawny neck, barely able to stand upright, and the rain is coming down and Alice’s jeans are sodden and her hands icy cold and the time is ticking away. She lets out a yell of frustration and takes an approach she used with all the children when they were toddlers.

“Fine,” she says, “fine. You stay here. See how you get on without me. Go and beg for scraps outside the fucking butcher’s. Have a good life.”

The dogs stop and look at her. She turns and walks away.

“Do you want some dogs?” she calls to the man, who is still sitting in the rain. “Seriously? Do you want them? You can have them.”

The man startles and looks up at her with his gingerbread eyes. “I . . . I . . .”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not being serious.”

“No,” he says. “No. I know that.”

She strides toward the slipway, toward the steps carved into the seawall. It’s three thirty. The dogs stop at the shoreline, glance at each other, then back at Alice. Then they run for her, arriving at her feet seconds later, salty and pungent.

Alice starts up the steps and then turns back when the man calls after her.

“Excuse me!” he says. “Excuse me. Where am I?”

“What?”

“Where am I? What’s the name of this place?”

She laughs. “Really?”

“Yes,” he says. “Really.”

“This is Ridinghouse Bay.”

He nods. “Right,” he says. “Thank you.”

“Get inside, will you,” she says softly to the man. “Please get out of this rain.”

He smiles apologetically and Alice waves and heads toward the school, hoping he’ll be gone by the time she gets back.



Alice knows she’s something of an oddball in Ridinghouse Bay. Which, in fairness, was already pretty full of oddballs before she arrived. But even in a town this strange Alice stands out with her Brixton accent and her Benetton family and her slightly brusque ways. Not to mention the dogs. They make a show of her everywhere she goes. They will not walk to heel, they bark and snap, they whine outside shops. She’s seen people cross the street to avoid her animals, Hero in particular with her muzzle and her huge muscular shoulders.

Ever since she got here Alice has played the role of the enigmatic, slightly scary loner, though that is not at all what she is. In London she had friends coming out of her ears. More friends than she knew what to do with. She was a party girl, a come-over-later-with-a-bottle-of-vodka-we’ll-put-the-world-to-rights girl. She’d been the kind of mum to stand at the school gates after drop-off and say, come on then, who’s up for a coffee? And she’d be there at the heart of them all, laughing the loudest, talking the most. Until she pushed it too far and blew her life open.

But she has a friend here now. Someone who gets her. Derry Dynes. They met eighteen months ago, on Romaine’s first day in school. Their eyes met and there was a flash of mutual recognition, of shared delight. “Fancy a coffee?” Derry Dynes had said, seeing the film of tears over Alice’s eyes as she watched her baby girl disappear into the classroom. “Or something stronger?”

Derry is about five years older than Alice and about a foot shorter. She has a son the same age as Romaine and a grown-up daughter who lives in Edinburgh. She loves dogs (she’s the type to let them kiss her on her mouth) and she loves Alice. Early on she learned that Alice was prone to making terrible decisions and letting life run away with her and now she acts as Alice’s moderator. She sits and counsels Alice for hours about issues she has with the school over their handling of Romaine’s learning difficulties but stops her from storming into the office to shout at the secretary. She’ll share two bottles of wine with her on a school night but encourage her to stick the cork back into the third. She tells her which hairdresser to go to and what to ask for—“ask for stepped layers, not feathered, and a half head of highlights with foils.” She used to be a hairdresser but now she’s a Reiki therapist. And she has more of an idea about Alice’s finances than Alice herself.

She’s standing outside the school now, under a huge red umbrella, her boy Danny and Romaine nestled together underneath.

“Christ. Thank you. Dogs went mental on the beach and I couldn’t get them back.”

She leans down to kiss the crown of Romaine’s head and takes her lunch box from her.

“What on earth were you doing on the beach in this weather?”

Alice tuts and says, “You don’t want to know.”

“No,” says Derry. “I do.”

“Are you busy? Got time for a cup of tea?”

Derry looks down at her son and says, “Well, I was supposed to be taking this one into town for shoes . . .”

“Well, just come via mine then, I’ll show you.”



“Look,” she says, standing by the seawall, peering down through the cascade of rain pouring off her umbrella.

He is still there.

“Him?” says Derry.

“Yeah. Him. I gave him that jacket. One of Barry’s.”

Derry gives an involuntary shudder. She remembers Barry too. Alice gave her a very thorough and evocative description of events at the time.

“Did he not have a coat then? Before?”

“No. Sitting there in a shirt. Soaked. Asked me where he was.”

The two children pull themselves up onto the edge of the wall by their fingertips and peer over.

“Where he was?”

“Yes. He seemed a bit confused.”

“Don’t get involved,” says Derry.

“Who said I was getting involved?”

“You gave him a jacket. You’re already getting involved.”

“That was just an act of simple human kindness.”

“Yes,” says Derry. “Exactly.”

Alice tuts at her friend and heads away from the seawall. “Are you seriously going shopping?” she asks her. “In this?”

Derry peers into the dark skies overhead and says, “No. Maybe not.”

“Come on then,” says Alice. “Come to mine. I’ll put a fire on.”



Derry and Danny stay for a couple of hours. The little ones play in the living room while Derry and Alice sit in the kitchen and drink tea. Jasmine returns at four o’clock, soaked to the skin, with a wet rucksack full of GCSE coursework, no coat, and no umbrella. Kai comes back at four thirty with two friends from school. Alice makes spaghetti for tea and Derry stops her opening a bottle of wine on account of her having to go home. She and Danny leave at six o’clock. It is still raining. Small rivers of muddy rainwater pour down the slipway to the beach and cascade off rooftops. And now a howling wind has set to, sending the rain onto the perpendicular, driving it into everything.

From the top floor of the house Alice sees that the man is still there. He’s no longer in the middle of the beach. He’s moved back toward the seawall and he’s sitting on a pile of rope. His face is turned up to the sky and his eyes are closed and something inside Alice aches when she looks at him. Of course he may be mad. He may be dangerous. But she thinks of his sad amber-brown eyes and the softness of his voice when he asked her where he was. And she is here in her home full of people, a pile of logs burning in the fireplace, warm and dry and safe. She can’t be here knowing that he is there.

She makes him a cup of tea, pours it into a flask, tells the big ones to keep an eye on Romaine, and goes to him.



“Here,” she says, passing him the flask.

He takes it from her and smiles.

“I thought I told you to go indoors.”

“I remember that,” he says.

“Good,” she says. “But I see you didn’t take my advice.”

“I can’t go indoors.”

“Are you homeless?”

He nods. Then shakes his head. Then says, “I think so. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Alice laughs softly. “How long have you been sitting out here?”

“I got here last night.”

“Where did you come from?”

He turns and looks at her. His eyes are wide and fearful. “I have no idea.”

Alice pulls away slightly. Now she’s starting to regret coming down here. Getting involved, as Derry said. “Seriously?” she says.

He pushes his damp hair off his forehead and sighs. “Seriously.” Then he holds the flask aloft. “Cheers,” he says. “You’re very kind.”

Alice stares out toward the sea. She’s not sure how to respond. Half of her wants to get back indoors to the warmth, the other feels like she needs to play this out a bit longer. She asks him another question. “What’s your name?”

“I think,” he says, gazing into his tea, “that I have lost my memory. I mean”—he turns to her suddenly—“that makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s the only thing that makes sense. Because I don’t know what my name is. And I must have a name. Everyone has a name. Don’t they?”

Alice nods.

“And I don’t know why I’m here or how I got here. And the more I think about it the more I think I’ve lost my memory.”

“Ah,” says Alice. “Yes. That makes sense. Do you . . . are you injured?” She points at his head.

He runs a hand over his skull for a moment, then looks at her. “No,” he says. “It doesn’t look like it.”

“Have you ever lost your memory before?”

“I don’t know,” he says, so ingenuously that they both laugh.

“You know you’re in the north, don’t you?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “I didn’t know that.”

“And you have a southern accent. Is that where you come from?”

He shrugs. “I guess so.”

“Jesus,” says Alice, “this is crazy. I assume you’ve checked all your pockets.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I found some stuff. Didn’t know what to make of any of it though.”

“Have you still got it?”

“Yes.” He leans to one side. “It’s here.” He pulls a handful of wet paper from his back pocket. “Oh.”

Alice stares at the mulch and then into the darkening sky. She pulls her hands down her face and exhales. “Right,” she says. “I must be mad. Well, actually, I am mad. But I have a studio room, in my backyard. I usually rent it out but it’s empty right now. Why don’t you come and spend a night there? We’ll dry out these bits of paper, then maybe tomorrow we can start putting you together? Yes?”

He turns and stares at her disbelievingly. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, please.”

“I have to warn you,” she says, getting to her feet. “I live in chaos. I have three very loud, rude children and three untrained dogs and my house is a mess. So don’t come with me expecting a sanctuary. It’s far from it.”

He nods. “Honestly,” he says. “Whatever. I really don’t mind. I’m just so grateful. I can’t believe how kind you’re being.”

“No,” says Alice, leading the wet stranger up the stone steps and toward her cottage, “neither can I.”

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