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People Like Her by Ellery Lloyd

Thriller

People Like Her

Debut

We love supporting debut authors. Congrats, Ellery Lloyd, on your first book!

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This is an early release that's only available to our members—the rest of the world has to wait to read it.

by Ellery Lloyd

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Quick take

Warning: This addictive suspense about an influencer and one creepy follower might just make you swear off your phone.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Unlikeable_Narrator

    Unlikeable narrator

  • Illustrated icon, Marriage_Issues

    Marriage issues

  • Illustrated icon, Mama_Drama

    Mama drama

  • Illustrated icon, Techie

    Tech world

Synopsis

To her adoring fans, Emmy Jackson, aka @the_mamabare, is the honest “Instamum” who always tells it like it is.

To her skeptical husband, a washed-up novelist who knows just how creative Emmy can be with the truth, she is a breadwinning powerhouse chillingly brilliant at monetizing the intimate details of their family life.

To one of Emmy’s dangerously obsessive followers, she’s the woman that has everything—but deserves none of it.

As Emmy’s marriage begins to crack under the strain of her growing success and her moral compass veers wildly off course, the more vulnerable she becomes to a very real danger circling ever closer to her family.

Content warning

This book contains mentions of child abuse, infertility and miscarriage.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of People Like Her.

People Like Her

Prologue

I think it is possible that I am dying.

For quite some time now, in any case, it has felt like I have been watching as my life scrolls past in front of my eyes.

My earliest memory: It is winter, sometime in the early 1980s. I am wearing mittens, a badly knitted hat, and an enormous red coat. My mother is pulling me across our back lawn on a blue plastic sled. Her smile is fixed. I look completely frozen. I can remember how cold my hands were in those mittens, the way every dip and bump of the ground felt through the sled, the creak of the snow beneath her boots.

My first day at school. I am swinging a brown leather satchel with my name written on a card peeking out from a small plastic window. EMMELINE. One navy knee sock is bunched around my ankle; my hair is in pigtails of slightly unequal length.

Me and Polly at twelve years old. We are having a sleepover at her house, already in our tartan pajamas, wearing mudpacks and waiting for our corn to pop in the microwave. The two of us in her hallway, slightly older, ready to go to the Halloween party where I had my first kiss. Polly was a pumpkin. I was a sexy cat. Us again, on a summer’s day, sitting cross-legged in our jeans and Doc Martens in a field of stubble. In spaghetti-strap dresses and chokers, ready for our end-of-school leavers’ ball. Memory after memory, one after another, until I find myself starting to wonder whether I can call to mind a single emotionally significant scene from my teenage years in which Polly does not feature, with her lopsided smile and her awkward posing.

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Why I love it

Recently, I fell into a mom influencer hole. (For book research! But also because I became obsessed!) These beautiful women with their well-behaved children were obviously presenting their lives as more perfect than they actually were, I decided. Then People Like Her by Ellery Lloyd came along to thrillingly upend my assumptions, through the twisty story of a mother who makes herself more of a mess to rake in the followers and the chilling consequences that follow. Imagine Gone Girl with a Momstagram account.

The husband and wife team behind the author’s pseudonym has fittingly written from the dueling perspectives of a married couple, Emmy and Dan Jackson. As Emmy’s mom account @the_mamabare grows more popular and less truthful, the cracks in their marriage deepen. Both protagonists are fascinating, but they’re not alone. We also get a third, unnamed narrator, who follows Emmy’s blog not for the #parentingtips, but because she wants revenge. The why and the how will shock you.

Smart, propulsive, and biting, People Like Her is a cautionary tale about the dangers of letting millions of strangers into your life. But it’s also about family, love, and how deeply we long for others to see us. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to this novel about social media addiction is that, while reading it, I wasn’t once tempted to reach for my phone.

Member ratings (16,451)

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View all
The Boyfriend
The Last One at the Wedding
Sleep Tight
First Lie Wins
House of Glass
Middle of the Night
Listen for the Lie
A Talent for Murder
Beautiful Ugly
Someone in the Attic
One Perfect Couple
Like Mother, Like Daughter
Kill for Me, Kill for You
Bad Tourists
Murder Road
Daughter of Mine
The Fury
The Other Mothers
When I’m Dead
The Soulmate
What Lies in the Woods
She Started It
The Only One Left
Dark Corners
Blacktop Wasteland
All the Dangerous Things
The Only Survivors
The Broken Girls
The Family Game
The Push
We Were Never Here
Things We Do in the Dark
The Golden Couple
The Stranger Upstairs
Gone Tonight
Too Good to Be True
The Last Word
You Are Not Alone
Rock Paper Scissors
Not a Happy Family
A Flicker in the Dark
Reckless Girls
The House Across the Lake
The Last Thing He Told Me
The Maidens
Everything We Didn't Say
The Paris Apartment
You're Invited
The Last Party
Dark Places
Pieces of Her
The Wife Between Us
Sharp Objects
None of This Is True
The Silent Patient
The Other Woman
Necessary People
The Family Upstairs
The Night Swim
Girl A
The Hunting Wives
Just Another Missing Person
First Born
The Lies I Tell
Breathless