Looking for a list of Lisa Jewell books in order? We’re here to help.
Lisa Jewell is one of the most popular British novelists in recent years. Readers love her books for their captivating plots, characters that seem like old friends, and wry humor. If you’re looking to get started with this author, continue reading.
Before we jump into the list of Lisa Jewell books in order, though, let’s learn a little about the author herself.
Who is Lisa Jewell?
Lisa Jewell is a popular New York Times bestselling author. Her writing career has spanned 22 years thus far and she has published 19 novels during that time. A few of her most popular titles include: The Family Upstairs, Then She Was Gone, Invisible Girl, and Watching You.
Jewell is known for suspenseful page-turners set amongst domestic drama. Collectively, her novels have sold more than ten million copies worldwide and been translated into 28 languages.
Jewell’s next novel, The Family Upstairs, is expected to be published on August 9, 2022. Following her previously established theme of domestic drama, it is about twisted marriages, fractured families, and deadly obsessions.
Lisa Jewell Books in Order
Below is a comprehensive list of the Lisa Jewell books in order, so you can know what comes next after each book.
Ralph’s Party Series
This series opens with the residents of a London brownstone at 31 Almanac Road, before creating a complex web of romance.
Ralph, an artist, realizes that he loves his new flatmate Jem, the most sensible, fun girl he has ever met. Unfortunately, Ralph’s best friend Smith has already won Jem’s affections. But Smith also still holds a flame for the femme fatale, Cheri, who lives upstairs.
Across the hall live Karl and Siobhan, who have been happily unmarried years. Until Karl gets a job as a London rush-hour DJ and is momentarily tempted to Cheri’s lair.
These six tenants become more enamored and more confused as the story progesses. Until their actual fates are revealed on one crucial night: The night of Ralph’s party.
Lisa Jewell’s debut was a huge success in England.
- Ralph’s Party (1999)
- After the Party (2010)
Lisa Jewell Books in Order – Standalone Novels
- Thirtynothing (2000)
- One-Hit Wonder (2000)
- 31 Dream Street (2000)
- A Friend of the Family (2003)
- Vince & Joy (2005)
- The Truth About Melody Browne (2009)
- The Making of Us (2011)
- Before I Met You (2012)
- The House We Grew Up In (2013)
- The Third Wife (2014)
- The Girls in the Garden (2015)
- I Found You (2016)
- Then She Was Gone (2018)
- Watching You (2018)
- The Family Upstairs (2019)
- Invisible Girl (2020)
- The Night She Disappeared (2021)
- The Family Remains (2022)
- None of This is True (2023)
Marvel Crime
This is a new venture by Lisa Jewell into the MCU and the first novel in the Marvel Crime series will follow Jessica Jones.
- Breaking the Dark (Expected: July 2, 2024)
Publication Order of Anthologies
- Tart Noir (2003)
Summary of Lisa Jewell Books In Order
Now let’s take a closer look at each of the Lisa Jewell books in order.
Award-winning British author Lisa Jewell has written many bestselling novels. 31 Dream Street won the Melissa Nathan Award for Best Comedy Romance.
Below we have included summaries for some of her popular standalone novels in order of publication.
1. Thirtynothing
On his thirtieth birthday, Dig Ryan bumps into his first love Delilah, whom he hasn’t seen in twelve years. Delilah was the most beautiful girl in school and a constant thorn-in-the-side of Nadine, who has been Dig’s best friend for the last fifteen years. Nadine isn’t about to let Delilah outshine and outmaneuver her again, which is when she calls her first love: Phil.
2. One-Hit Wonder
Shy and gawky, Ana has always daydreamed about living the life of her exotic half-sister, Bee, a pop singer who had a #1 hit single before she inexplicably vanished from the celebrity scene. When Bee turns up dead, Ana is dispatched to the big city to clear out her apartment.
Instantly seduced by the second-hand glamour of Bee’s baubles, bangles, and bottles of Pierre-Jouet, Ana takes up with Bee’s wild club-hopping cronies. News of a missing cat and a remote country cottage soon convince Ana that her sister was leading a secret life. Now Ana is on a mission to discover what really happened to Bee Bearhom, and what is about to happen to the unremarkable Ana Wills.
3. 31 Dream Street
31 Dream Street was also published as Roommates Wanted.
1990: Please write and tell me why you should live here.
Toby Dobbs received a big Victorian house with too many bedrooms to count as a wedding present from his father, but his marriage is over within a month. Very alone, and very lonely, Toby posts an advertisement seeking the “Unexpectedly Alone” to become his roommates. Fifteen years later the wayward souls he takes in are still living with him, with no intention of leaving.
2004: Please tell me how I can convince you to move out.
Toby Dobbs has met Leah Pilgrim from across the road, and they’re falling in love. But before they can begin a new life together, Toby and Leah must help Toby’s house of the sweet slackers and lovelorn misfits, solve their problems, and set themselves free. But can their new relationship survive the test?
4. A Friend of The Family
Brothers Tony, Sean, and Ned had the perfect upbringing. But now that they are grown up, real life is starting to get in the way.
Tony’s dealing with divorce and a weight problem. Novelist Sean is up against a serious case of writer’s block and a shock announcement from his “perfect” new girlfriend.
Their parents have a new lodger: Gervase. Which raises the question, why is Bernie, their mother, so keen to give this unsavory waif a home? And what is the real reason for kid brother Ned’s surprise return from his travels in Australia?
5. Vince and Joy
Joy and Vince have their entire lives ahead of them when they first meet as teenagers and instantly fall for each other. Two weeks later, they are forced apart by a misunderstanding.
Nearly 20 later, they find themselves in a completely different world. But neither one of them was able to let go of their first love. What happens if you meet the right person at the wrong time?
6. The Truth About Melody Browne
When she was nine years old, Melody Browne’s house burned down, taking every toy, every photograph, every item of clothing and old Christmas card with it. But not only did the fire destroy all her possessions, it took with it all her memories. Melody Browne can remember nothing before her ninth birthday.
Now in her early thirties, Melody lives in a council flat in the middle of London with her seventeen-year-old son. She hasn’t seen her parents since she left home at fifteen, but Melody doesn’t mind, she’s better off on her own. She’s made a good life for herself and her son and she likes it that way.
Until one night something extraordinary happens. Whilst attending a hypnotist show with her first date in years she faints – and when she comes round she starts to remember.
At first her memories mean nothing to her but then slowly, day-by-day, she begins to piece together the real story of her childhood. Her journey takes her to the seaside town of Broadstairs, to oddly familiar houses in London backstreets, and to meetings with strangers who love her like their own.
But with every mystery she solves another one materialises, with every question she answers another appears. And Melody begins to wonder if she’ll ever know the truth about her past.
7. The Making of Us
In a hospice in Bury St Edmunds, a man called Daniel is slowly fading away. His friend Maggie sits with him every day; she holds his hand and she listens to the story of his life, to his regrets, and to his secrets.
And then he tells her about the children he has never met and never will. He talks of them wistfully. His legacy, he calls them.
Lydia, Dean and Robyn don’t know each other. Yet. And they are all facing difficult changes.
Lydia is still wearing the scars from her traumatic childhood and although she is wealthy and successful, her life is lonely and disjointed. Dean is a young man, burdened with unexpected responsibility, whose life is going nowhere. And Robyn wants to be a doctor, just like her father – a man she’s never met – but is her whole life built on an illusion?
Three people leading three very different lives. All lost and all looking for something. But when they slowly find their way into each other’s lives, everything starts to change.
8. Before I Met You
After her grandmother Arlette’s death, Betty is finally ready to begin her life. She had forfeited university, parties, boyfriends, summer jobs – all the usual preoccupations of a woman her age – in order to care for Arlette in their dilapidated, albeit charming home on the English island of Guernsey.
Her will included a beneficiary unknown to Betty and her family, a woman named Clara Pickle who presumably could be found at a London address.
Now, having landed on a rather shabby street corner in ’90s Soho, Betty is determined to find the mysterious Clara. She’s ready for whatever life has to throw her way. Or so she thinks.
In 1920s bohemian London, Arlette De La Mare is starting her new life in a time of postwar change. Beautiful and charismatic, she is soon drawn into the hedonistic world of the Bright Young People. But two years after her arrival in London, tragedy strikes and she flees back to her childhood home and remains there for the rest of her life.
As Betty navigates the ups and downs of city life and begins working as a nanny for a rock star tabloid magnet, her search for Clara leads her to a man. A stranger to Betty, but someone who meant the world to her grandmother. Will the secrets of Arlette’s past help Betty find her own way to happiness in the present?
9. The House We Grew Up In
Meet the Bird family. They live in a honey-colored house in a picture-perfect Cotswolds village, with rambling, unkempt gardens stretching beyond.
Pragmatic Meg, dreamy Beth, and tow-headed twins Rory and Rhys all attend the village school and eat home-cooked meals together every night.
Their father is a sweet gangly man named Colin, who still looks like a teenager with floppy hair and owlish, round-framed glasses. Their mother is a beautiful hippy named Lorelei, who exists entirely in the moment. And she makes every moment sparkle in her children’s lives.
Then one Easter weekend, tragedy comes to call. The event is so devastating that, almost imperceptibly, it begins to tear the family apart. Years pass as the children become adults, find new relationships, and develop their own separate lives.
Soon it seems as though they’ve never been a family at all. But then something happens that calls them back to the house they grew up in – and to what really happened that Easter weekend so many years ago.
10. The Third Wife
In the early hours of a summer morning, a young woman steps into the path of an oncoming bus. A tragic accident? Or suicide?
At the center of this puzzle is Adrian Wolfe, a successful architect and grief-stricken widower, who, a year after his third wife’s death, begins to investigate the cause. As Adrian looks back on their brief but seemingly happy marriage, disturbing secrets begin to surface.
The divorces from his two previous wives had been amicable, or so it seemed; his children, all five of them, were resilient as ever, or so he thought. But something, or someone, must have pushed Maya over the edge.
11. The Girls in the Garden
Imagine that you live on a picturesque communal garden square, an oasis in urban London where your children run free, in and out of other people’s houses. You’ve known your neighbors for years and you trust them. Implicitly.
You think your children are safe. But are they really?
On a midsummer night, as a festive neighborhood party is taking place, preteen Pip discovers her thirteen-year-old sister Grace lying unconscious and bloody in a hidden corner of a lush rose garden. What really happened to her? And who is responsible?
12. I Found You
In the windswept British seaside town of Ridinghouse Bay, single mom Alice Lake finds a man sitting on a beach outside her house. He has no name, no jacket, and no idea how he got there. Against her better judgment, she invites him inside.
Meanwhile, in a suburb of London, newlywed Lily Monrose grows anxious when her husband fails to return home from work one night. Soon, she receives even worse news: According to the police, the man she married never even existed.
Twenty-three years earlier, Gray and Kirsty Ross are teenagers on a summer holiday with their parents. The annual trip to Ridinghouse Bay is uneventful, until an enigmatic young man starts paying extra attention to Kirsty. Something about him makes Gray uncomfortable – and it’s not just because he’s a protective older brother.
Who is the man on the beach? Where is Lily’s missing husband? And what ever happened to the man who made such a lasting and disturbing impression on Gray?
13. Then She Was Gone
Ellie Mack was the perfect daughter. She was fifteen, the youngest of three. Beloved by her parents, friends, and teachers, and half of a teenaged golden couple.
Ellie was days away from an idyllic post-exams summer vacation, with her whole life ahead of her. And then she was gone.
Now, her mother Laurel Mack is trying to put her life back together. It’s been ten years since her daughter disappeared, seven years since her marriage ended, and only months since the last clue in Ellie’s case was unearthed.
So when she meets an unexpectedly charming man in a café, no one is more surprised than Laurel at how quickly their flirtation develops into something deeper. Before she knows it, she’s meeting Floyd’s daughters – and his youngest, Poppy, takes Laurel’s breath away.
Because looking at Poppy is like looking at Ellie. And now, the unanswered questions she’s tried so hard to put to rest begin to haunt Laurel anew. Where did Ellie go? Did she really run away from home, as the police have long suspected, or was there a more sinister reason for her disappearance?
Who is Floyd, really? And why does his daughter remind Laurel so viscerally of her own missing girl?
14. Watching You
Melville Heights is one of the nicest neighbourhoods in Bristol, England; home to doctors and lawyers and old-money academics. It’s not the sort of place where people are brutally murdered in their own kitchens.
But it is the sort of place where everyone has a secret. And everyone is watching you.
As the headmaster credited with turning around the local school, Tom Fitzwilliam is beloved by one and all. Including Joey Mullen, his new neighbor, who quickly develops an intense infatuation with this thoroughly charming yet unavailable man.
Joey thinks her crush is a secret, but Tom’s teenaged son Freddie – a prodigy with aspirations of becoming a spy for MI5 – excels in observing people and has witnessed Joey behaving strangely around his father.
One of Tom’s students, Jenna Tripp, also lives on the same street, and she’s not convinced her teacher is as squeaky clean as he seems. For one thing, he has taken a particular liking to her best friend and fellow classmate, and Jenna’s mother – whose mental health has admittedly been deteriorating in recent years – is convinced that Mr. Fitzwilliam is stalking her.
Meanwhile, twenty years earlier, a schoolgirl writes in her diary, charting her doomed obsession with a handsome young English teacher named Mr. Fitzwilliam.
15. The Family Upstairs
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.
16. Invisible Girl
Young Saffyre Maddox spent three years under the care of renowned child psychologist Roan Fours. When Dr. Fours decides their sessions should end, Saffyre feels abandoned. She begins looking for ways to connect with him, from waiting outside his office to walking through his neighborhood late at night.
She soon learns more than she ever wanted to about Roan and his deceptively perfect family life. On a chilly Valentine’s night, Saffyre will disappear, taking any secrets she has learned with her.
Owen Pick’s life is falling apart. In his thirties and living in his aunt’s spare bedroom, he has just been suspended from his job as a teacher after accusations of sexual misconduct—accusations he strongly denies.
Searching for professional advice online, he is inadvertently sucked into the dark world of incel forums, where he meets a charismatic and mysterious figure.
Owen lives across the street from the Fours family. The Fours have a bad feeling about their neighbor; Owen is a bit creepy and suspect and their teenaged daughter swears he followed her home from the train station one night.
Could Owen be responsible? What happened to the beautiful missing Saffyre, and does her disappearance truly connect them all?
17. The Night She Disappeared
On a beautiful summer night in a charming English suburb, a young woman and her boyfriend disappear after partying at the massive country estate of a new college friend.
One year later, a writer moves into a cottage on the edge of the woods that border the same estate. Known locally as the Dark Place, the dense forest is the writer’s favorite area for long walks and it’s on one such walk that she stumbles upon a mysterious note that simply reads, “DIG HERE.”
Could this be a clue towards what has happened to the missing young couple? And what exactly is buried in this haunted ground?
18. The Family Remains
When Rachel Rimmer’s phone rings in the early morning, she is shocked when she hears her husband’s housekeeper sobbing on the line. Her husband, Michael, has been found dead in the cellar of his house in France and all signs point to murder.
The French police conclude that Michael was killed by his gangster associates. They have no idea that the real killer is still out there: his ex-wife, Lucy. A year later, she and her children are happily living in London, unaware that Rachel is on the hunt for her.
She may have never met this woman, but Rachel knows Lucy was the last person to see her husband alive. And there is nothing that is going to stop her from discovering the truth.
Final Thoughts on Lisa Jewell Books in Order
Since her first book was published in 1999, Lisa Jewell has published nearly 20 books, which makes for ample reading material. She is beloved by many for her captivating plots and wry humor.
If you choose to read the Lisa Jewell books in order of publication, especially with her standalone novels, you will bear witness to her growth and progression as an author.
Looking for more books in order?
Check out this list of Harlan Coben books in order.
2 thoughts on “All 20+ Lisa Jewell Books in Order | Ultimate Guide”
First time reading Lisa Jewell- “The night she disappeared.” She’s an excellent writier– Hooks you in from the start, great character development, suspenseful, and descriptive settings. Looking forward to reading more of her work!
Thoroughly enjoy Lisa Jewell’s books. Once I start reading one I’m hooked and usually read a book in on sitting.
Excellent Author!