I Found You

I Found You by Lisa Jewell

Published by Century

Hardback Edition

14^th July 2016

 

'How long have you been sitting out here?'

'I got here yesterday.'

'Where did you come from?'

'I have no idea.'

East Yorkshire: Single mum Alice Lake finds a man on the beach outside her house. He has no name, no jacket, no idea what he is doing there. Against her better judgement she invites him in to her home.

Surrey: Twenty-one-year-old Lily Monrose has only been married for three weeks. When her new husband fails to come home from work one night she is left stranded in a new country where she knows no one. Then the police tell her that her husband never existed.

I haven’t read anything by Lisa Jewell in ages; when she first came on the scene as an author I eagerly brought every one of her books; having just read this I'm not sure why I stopped!  Within the space of two weeks I have just finished this and her previous novel The Girls – she hasn’t lost any of her magic though her books are probably billed as being less ‘chick lit’ than they were in the beginning.

Back to the book in question, I Found You is set both in Surrey and East Yorkshire with a dual narrative between single mum Alice and new wife Lily.  One day Alice sees a man sitting outside her house on the beach in the rain.  He looks lost.  Her penchant for gathering in waifs and strays doesn’t stop her from approaching him and she discovers that he is suffering from amnesia – he can’t tell her anything about himself for he doesn’t even remember his own name.  Back in Surrey, Lily is increasingly worried about her husband who has failed to come home from work, the police don’t take her concerns seriously at first until she continues to hound them; then she makes that startling discovery that by all accounts the man she has married is an alias – he doesn’t actually exist.

I’ll leave you to make your own connections with the story here without giving anything away but the book kept me turning the pages long into the night to ensure that the story took the path I wanted it to.  I adored Alice as a character, she seemed so realistic and someone you would actually want to be friends with and the book had the ending that I so desired which made me very happy when I reached the end.

Happy Reading

Miss Chapter x