THE BRIEF LIVES OF ELLA JENNER

Psychological thriller about a woman who must lie at first to survive and who then makes a living from it.

Ella Jenner is a very unreliable narrator. At six she saw her quiet mother push her father, the bullying John Jenner, down the stairs. As the police arrived her mother murmured ‘Tell the truth now Ella’ and Ella did just that. As a result, her mother was locked away in an asylum and Ella sent to live with her aunts. It was an early lesson in where the truth gets you. Ella has never told the truth since. Her two elderly aunts were besotted with their dead brother, and to survive in their house she has to convince them she is more his daughter than she ever was of the woman who killed him. But lying comes surprisingly easily. She simply needs to channel the spirit of her father – a charlatan who made a living from the lies he used to sell his quack diets and pills.

As she grows up, the lies get larger, making her a virtual imposter, and leaving a victim trail of people she has taken in. But the more she lies, the more a little of her dies. Not that she would ever admit that. She simply sees herself as growing to inhabit the characters she creates for herself – cleverer, more attractive, more accomplished than everyone else around her. In a just a few years, she convinces people she is a nurse, an international athlete, even – briefly – a nun.

But she’s a woman incapable of inhabiting her own body. She has to keep moving on, even when she falls in love. Which is what happens when she meets Neil, a married history teacher who refuses to abandon his wife and child for her. Having stolen his whole curriculum of history notes, she ends up teaching history in a third rate private school where she creates a loyal band of sixth form girls who become her girls. Her tribe. Only one girl – Natalia – seems proof against the lies. Natalia seems to see right through her.

Ultimately Ella discovers that she can’t escape her own life, a life in which even lies have a strange habit of coming true.