The Family Upstairs

The Family Upstairs is a thriller by Lisa Jewell, published on 5 November 2019. Its central character, Libby Jones, is adopted and knows very little about the family she was born into. The house is in Chelsea, and it is the place she was found.

Shortly after her twenty-fifth birthday she learns what her long-dead parents left to her: a large townhouse in Chelsea, London. The house comes with the fact that she was found alive inside it as a baby, after the police discovered the bodies of three adults.

Her birth parents, Henry Senior and Martina Lamb, appeared to have died in a collective suicide, and Libby's own birth name was Serenity Lamb. Her two older siblings, Henry and Lucy, disappeared at the same time the bodies were found and have never come forward to claim the house.

The novel moves between the present day and a set of flashbacks narrated by Henry Lamb that reveal what happened in the house between 1988 and 1994, and Libby's investigation of her inheritance is what sets both timelines moving.