I Found You

Two women, twenty years of secrets, and a man who can’t remember lie at the heart of Lisa Jewell’s brilliant new novel.

Surrey:
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.

East Yorkshire:
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 into her home.

But who is he, and how can she trust a man who has lost his memory?

Lisa Jewell
had always planned to write her first book when she was fifty. In fact she wrote it when she was twenty-seven and had just been made redundant from her job as a secretary. Inspired by Nick Hornby’s
High Fidelity
, a book about young people just like her who live in London, she wrote the first three chapters of what was to become her first novel,
Ralph’s Party
. It went on to become the bestselling debut novel of 1998.

Twelve bestselling novels later, she lives in London with her husband and their two daughters. Lisa writes every day in a local café where she can drink coffee, people-watch and, without access to the internet, actually get some work done…

Keep in touch with Lisa:

www.lisa-jewell.co.uk

LisaJewellOfficial

@lisajewelluk

Ralph’s Party

Thirtynothing

One-Hit Wonder

Vince & Joy

A Friend of the Family

31 Dream Street

The Truth About Melody Browne

After the Party

The Making of Us

Before I Met You

The House We Grew Up In

The Third Wife

The Girls

Alice Lake lives in a house by the sea. It is a tiny house, a coastguard’s cottage, built over 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 feet. 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 street lights, 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 colourful 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 in other rooms properly. 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-coloured Joules zip-neck jumper, 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 favourite flower,’ he says in the ‘Any other comments’ box).