None of This Is True Summary: Plot, Characters and Themes of Lisa Jewell's Thriller
What None of This Is True is about
None of This Is True is a 2023 thriller by the British author Lisa Jewell. It is set in the suburbs of contemporary London. It follows two women whose lives become tangled after a chance meeting. Alix Summer hosts a podcast called "All Woman", where she interviews women about their success stories. Josie Fair is a woman with a painful and shadowed history who wants her story told.
The two meet in a local pub, where both are celebrating their forty-fifth birthday. Josie introduces herself in the bathroom as Alix's birthday twin. They were even born in the same hospital. A week later Josie turns up at Alix's children's school with a proposal. She wants to change the life she has lived for years, and she wants Alix to document her progress for a new podcast.
Alix has grown bored of her current series and wants to try something new. She agrees. What Josie tells her is troubling from the start. Yet Alix senses it could become a career-defining story. That tension between unease and ambition drives the first half of the book.
The main characters
Alix Summer is a popular podcaster with a busy family life. Her marriage is under strain. Her husband Nathan is outwardly loving and charismatic and works as a successful office estate agent. He has also become increasingly irresponsible and shows signs of alcoholism. He regularly goes on benders and stays in hotels instead of coming home.
Josie Fair has been married to Walter Fair, a man twenty-seven years her senior, for nearly all her life. She met him when she was thirteen. She began an affair with him at sixteen and married him at nineteen. Watching the sociable Alix, she begins to yearn for something different. She quickly becomes obsessed with Alix and steals items of sentimental value from her house.
Walter Fair is Josie's husband. Through Josie's account, Alix comes to see him as a dark figure. When Alix finally meets him, he tries to warn her that Josie is controlling and manipulative and tends to misrepresent the truth. Alix dismisses this as an attempt to deceive her.
Erin and Roxy are the Fairs' daughters. Erin, the elder, is in her twenties and stays at home. She plays video games, refuses to leave her room and eats nothing but baby food. Roxy had a violent record at school and ran away at sixteen. She has not been seen since. Brooke Ripley, one of Roxy's school friends, also features in Josie's story.
The themes
Identity sits at the centre of the book. Josie latches on to Alix from their first meeting. The shared birthday and the shared hospital give her a reason to see the two of them as linked. As the interviews go on she compares their lives more and more closely. She takes Alix's belongings. She starts to decide what Alix's life ought to look like.
Revenge and resentment build steadily. Josie develops an obsessive hatred for Nathan and resents Alix for still loving him. She grows more hostile to Walter too. After a humiliating dinner at the Summers' home she argues with him and threatens to reveal his secrets to Alix. In this book, small grievances harden into fixed beliefs.
Madness, and the question of whose account to trust, runs underneath everything. The title points straight at that question. Josie's story grows darker with each interview. Alix has to decide what to believe while sitting across from the person telling it. The podcast format sharpens the problem, because Alix is building a public story out of one woman's word.
Why it still matters
The novel uses the true crime podcast as its frame. It asks what happens when a storyteller wants a great story badly enough to ignore her own doubts. Alix keeps interviewing Josie despite her misgivings, and the book is clear about why. That makes her a more complicated figure than a simple target.
It also works well as a listening experience. The audiobook is performed by a full cast that includes Nicola Walker, Louise Brealey and Kristin Atherton. Lisa Jewell herself is among the readers. For a story built around recorded interviews, that approach suits the material.
It will suit readers who enjoy domestic thrillers with an unreliable voice at the centre. Be aware that it deals with grooming, child sexual abuse, alcoholism and coercive control.
Spoilers: how it ends
Stop here if you want to avoid the ending.
On the night of the dinner, Josie turns up at Alix's house in the early morning with blood on her clothes. She claims Walter attacked her and that she and Erin fled. She refuses to call the police or her mother and stays with Alix for a week. Parts of her story begin to fall apart. Alix is unnerved by how content Josie seems and how little she worries about Erin. Alix also learns that Brooke disappeared around the time Roxy ran away. Before Josie leaves, she secretly withdraws large amounts of cash from Erin's bank account. Erin had earned that money as a gaming streamer. Josie plans to use it to convince Alix to leave Nathan.
The day after Josie leaves, Nathan goes out with friends and disappears. A hotel calls Alix about a room he checked into, paid for online with Erin's card. CCTV shows Nathan getting into a car rented with the same card. Alix realises Josie has kidnapped him and calls the police. They break into the Fairs' flat. They find Walter dead and Erin barely alive, trapped in a closet.
Roxy then reappears and tells her side of the story on Alix's podcast. She says no abuse from Walter ever happened. Josie, she says, was a controlling and abusive mother. Roxy also reveals that she and Brooke were in a relationship before she disappeared, and that Josie was jealous.
