TUESDAY EXCERPTS: “THE FAMILY UPSTAIRS”

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events: First Chapter/Intros, originally hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea and now hosted by I’d Rather Be at the Beach; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by The Purple Booker.

Today’s feature is The Family Upstairs, by Lisa Jewell.

 

 

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Intro:  (Prologue)

It would be inaccurate to say that my childhood was normal before they came.  It was far from normal, but it felt normal because it was all I’d known.  It’s only now, with decades of hindsight, that I can see how odd it was.

I was nearly eleven when they came, and my sister was nine.

They lived with us for more than five years and they turned everything very, very dark.  My sister and I had to learn how to survive.

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Teaser:  Libby pushes the crib and it creaks pathetically, evidencing its great age.  Who was it bought for? she wonders.  Was it bought for her?  Or for generations of babies before her? (p. 60).

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Synopsis:  Be careful who you let in.

Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am.

She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well—and she is on a collision course to meet them.

Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone.

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Would you keep reading?  I have been eagerly anticipating this book.

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