"Here One Moment" by Liane Moriarty

An audio book.

On a delayed Australian plane flight an old lady passenger suddenly gets up and tells people at what age they'll die and the cause of their death. We get the PoV of Leo, 43, who will die in months from a work accident (he overworks, neglecting his family); Sue, 63, (who'll die at 66 of pancreatic cancer); Allegra (a pretty, efficient air stewardess who will self-harm); Paula, 36 (with 2 kids - one will drown at 7, the other will live to 103); Ethan, who's back from a funeral (who'll die of assault at 30); Don and Eve who've just married (Eve's spouse will kill her).

We get first a paragraph from the PoV of Cherry, the old lady, then longer snippets that often have a connection with the surrounding material. After the incident she recalled nothing about it. Her mother was a psychic, her father died young, struck by lightning. Her fiance died in Vietnam. She married David, a rather uncaring man half-Korean doctor who was sterile. Good sex but they didn't like each other much. She started to drink. Her husband started sleeping with Stella. They divorced. David and Cherry decide to adopt. Cherry's mother dies, but not before Cherry gets a reading from her - Cherry recognised the tricks. Cherry remarries. After 30+ years her husband dies on a plane (the same route as the strange flight).

Interrupting Cherry's story are the lives of the various characters. Ethan, fancies his wacky, rich house-mate Jasmine who brings home a man then breaks up with him. He becomes obessive, violent and suspects Ethan. Allegra continues sleeping sometimes with pilot Jonny. She bad back pains. Don knows that he has murderous thoughts while sleepwalking so he handcuffs himself at night or sleeps in a different room. Then 3 people (2 nearly 100 years old) die at the predicted age. The survivors take precautions, just in case. They start getting in touch with each other. The ones who'll die old start taking risks.

Cherry still hasn't been identified. Then after a 4th death (faked for publicity) the predictions begin to come unstuck. She releases a statement saying that she had a mental incident on the plane. In an epilogue we discover that the boy who should have drowned at 7 went on to win a swimming gold medal - after the flight his mother had made him do many swimming lessons, so he survived an incident at sea went he was 7.

A probability theme (fallacies etc) is sustained - Cherry's an actuary. I like the details - how someone pushes aside a headphone with a thumb when spoken to, how the atmosphere in a room changes like in a classroom after the teacher's lost their temper. But I was never convinced by the Allegra character.

Other reviews

• Adele Dumont (The far-fetched plot of Here One Moment wouldn’t matter so much were its characters memorable. But there are just so very many, and post-flight they mostly lead their own separate lives, only really reconnecting via a Facebook group. As a result, there are none of the complicated group dynamics that made her other novels so compelling. ... wit is fleeting, and not enough to rescue a narrative that is too baggy and a host of characters who are ultimately forgettable.)
• Anne Logan (Would men connect with this book as much as women? Likely not, as there were considerably more female perspectives, and at times, the men could be infantilized a bit (in good humour, but still, I noticed it). Does Moriarty have a bunch of male fans? Again, probably not)
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• capsulenz

"What Alice Forgot" by Liane Moriarty

An audio book.

In 2008, after a bang on the head at the gym, Alice, 39, is taken to hospital. She thinks she's pregnant with her first child. The doctor points out her Caesarian scar. Her last 10 years have disappeared.

Some chapters are Alice's. Some chapters are her older sister Elizabeth's homework for Dr Hodges (her therapist). Some chapters are old friend Franny's blog posts and the resulting comments (Franny, 75, lived next door to Alice's mother until her mother moved away).

From Elizabeth, married to Ben, we learn that Alice has 3 children and that her husband Nick Love walked out 6 months before. There's a custody battle. Alice recalls many moments from 10 or so years ago as she tries to make sense of who she's become. She learns how she reacted the first time to what she's re-learning now. She feels like an imposter in her own life. Alice is shocked to find out that her mother Barbara has married Roger, Nick's father. Elizabeth has tried expensively to have children. She and Ben disagree about adoption.

Alice returns home. It's the sort of house she's always wanted. She looks around for clues about herself and her children (who are with Nick's parents). Franny visits. Even she doesn't know why the divorce is happening. Alice suspects that it might be something to do with "Gina". Alice is hosting a party for kindergarten parents that night. The head is who she's been dating for a month, apparently. Have they had sex?

Gina was Alice's best friend, making Elizabeth and Nick envious. Gina also had IVF children. She didn't have an affair with Nick. She died in a car accident that Alice and Madison (a daughter) witnessed.

When Nick returns the kids he seems to be expecting hostility but Alice is kind. She finds the new Nick irritating at times. Had she been right to separate? Had they married when they were too young? She's organised a world record attempt to bake the world's biggest Meringue pie using Gina's recipe.

Madison is suspended for bullying. Before, Nick had left Alice to deal with such issues. Now she insists that Nick is involved.

Her memories return. We're rushed through them. Things make sense. Elizabeth is tense about being pregnant - months of anxiety ahead. Franny meets a man.

In the epilogue 10 years later we find out how the kids turned out. Nick and Alice are together.

I like the idea of how Alice needs to recalculate her decisions, how she had to work out how she'd changed from who she was to who she is, how she makes use of having another chance

Other reviews

• thebookbag (Alice soon learns that who she thinks she is, is at odds with the woman she appears to have evolved into, someone she has little in common with and for that matter doesn't even like very much. ... I'll admit at times I was a bit too eager to second guess where the story was going as I figured this type of novel would be fairly predictable, so extra points go to Liane Moriarty for genuinely surprising me)

"Apples Never Fall" by Liane Moriarty

An audio book. Sydney. One time-line begins when Joy disappears - we see how the family and the police react. Another timeline begins months before, when Savannah appears. Some of the action is observed by characters who aren't seen again.

Joy (69) Delauney and Stan ran a tennis club. Their children are Brooke (about 30), Logan, Troy, and Amy (who has mental issues). They'd all been top 5 in the Australian junior ratings. Joy wants grandchildren. She doesn't know that Brooke (who's started her physiotherapy business and has migraines) has begun a trial separation with Grant, or that Logan is splitting with Indira. Stan's most successful pupil Harry won Wimbledon then changed coach. He wants to made a come-back. Troy is rich. Savannah had recently knocked on Joe and Stan's door at random, wanting help because her partner had hit her. They'd given her a bed. She was interested in them, and made the meals. They'd had sex for the first time in ages. Joy is doing a life-writing course. We learn that the marriage was bad enough at times for her to plan to leave. Stan's mother left his father because he hit her. Stan used to suddenly leave the family for a night (once 5 nights) when things got too much. Do his kids inherit this way of coping?

Savannah goes to Troy, claiming that his father made a pass at her. He pays her to stop her telling his mother. The siblings start investigating Savannah. Her ex says she’s a habitual lier. Image searches reveal that Savannah is Harry’s sister. She admits that she was angry about her brother’s success and blamed the coaches. The family learns that it was Joy who had made Harry change coach, not Harry’s dad (as they'd been told). She wanted Stan to have more time to coach their own kids.

Troy’s ex, Claire, is with someone else. She wants to use one of the embryos they’d frozen.

Months after Savannah leaves, Joy (“a stick of dynamite with a very long fuse”) abandons her bike when it gets a puncture. She and Stan haven't been getting on well. When she gets home, grumpy, she discovers that Harry's sent Stan a draft of his auto-biography. Harry's father had told him that he had to win at tennis to gt money to pay for her sister's cancer treatment, so he cheated. Joy disappears before Stan does his usual disappearing trick.

An abandoned bicycle is picked up by a man who puts it into his car. He dies in an accident minutes later. People (including Brooke) are overheard in a cafe talking about a family member who disappeared a week before. Joy had texted each of her children that she wanted to go off grid for a while. Stan had scratches on his face and had had the car expensively cleaned next day. The police (Nicole and Ethan) suspect Stan. A body’s found - not Joy's.

As the police are arresting Stan, Joy returns. She'd left a note but the dog had eaten it. She'd been wondering where to go when Savannah had called her. They'd been together for 3 weeks. While Harry had been managed by his father, Savannah's mother had been starving her to make her into a ballet dancer.

Covid hits. Indira and Logan get back together. Stan and Joy find a way to carry on. We learn that Stan's dad told Stan to walk away when he was angry, rather than hit people. Savannah visits her mother, locking her into her bedroom with food. On the flight back she tells the man next to her that her mother plays tennis.

Savannah's family, like Joy's, has traits that pass from one generation to the next. It's the longest audio book I've heard. Too long.

Other reviews

• Beejay Silcox (Apples Never Fall ends up feeling indulgently overgarnished, like some ornate cafe breakfast that’s designed to be Instagrammed rather than eaten. It’s all perfectly readable, but it’s hard not to want something more from someone so scabrously smart. “If Joy had been young and beautiful,” Moriarty writes, “the street would’ve been crawling with reporters.” As she’s a woman in her 60s, the case simmers along as a minor neighbourhood scandal. It’s hard not to feel, in so clumsily grafting Joy’s story to a young, titillating stranger, Moriarty has done exactly the same thing)
• Ivy Pochoda (The novel’s focus starts to meander in the last third. As Moriarty juggles two prime suspects, we lose sight of the family dynamic, which is the more compelling part of the story. Instead of a nail-biting fifth set, we are served up a handicap round robin played at the local club in which a whole bunch of cute clues and red herrings coalesce into a comical explanation of Joy’s fate. )

"The Husband's Secret" by Liane Moriarty

An audio book.

Cecilia has found an enveloped letter for her from her husband, John Paul, "to be opened after I die". He's away, so she phones him before opening it. He's embarrassed about it. They have 3 young daughters. Polly is 6 and beautiful. Ester, 10, lurches from one booky obsession to another (currently the Berlin Wall). Isobel is 12. Celicia witnessed a child die in a car accident a while before. Cecilia does Tupelware parties. She and John Paul have not had sex for 6 months or so.

Will and Tess have a son Liam, 6. Tess's cousin Felicity has lost 40kg. Felicity and Will have just told Tess that they're in love. Tess flies back to Sydney (where John Paul went to school) taking Liam with her. Tess thinks about sex. She meets an old boyfriend, Connor, sleeping with him after their first coffee. Lucy (who's broken her ankle) is Tess's mother.

Rob and Lauren and little son Jacob are visiting Rob's widowed mother Rachel with news. They're going to New York for 2 years. There's a flashback to when Janie (Rachel and Ed's daughter) was 18 - the day of her death. The story of that day progresses in small bursts during the main timeline. Rachel had been late picking up Janie on that final day because she'd been flirting with a colleague. She's a secreatary at the school where Connor is a teacher and Liam has become a pupil. Polly goes to the same school and want to invite Connor to her party.

When Ester and Polly are in the car with Cecilia, Ester wonders what would have happened if the Berlin Wall went up when her mother was on one side, and her father on the other. Polly says she saw dad crying in the shower, and he looks strangely at Isobel. Celilia wonders briefly if John Paul is gay or a paedophile, then recalls that he tried suicide when he was a student.

Rachel finds a video that makes her even more sure that Connor killed her daughter.

John Paul returns 3 days early. They make love. He searches for the letter but she's moved it. She reads it. It's a confession that he killed Janie after she broke off their secret relationship. John Paul says that his non-sex was a sort of self-harm, that his crying was because Isobel reminded him of Janie. Celicia deals with the news surprisingly well. She thinks about the Berlin people who died for freedom, and wonders whether Janie's dying was worth it. She meets John Paul's mother Virginia and suspects she too knows that John Paul is the murderer.

Felicity turns up at Tess's to tell her it's over. Will turns up to explain and apologise. This is the least convincing of a number of surprising emotional reactions in the novel.

Rachel tries to run over Connor but Polly is cycling fast towards Connor and is knocked over instead. Her right hand has to be amputated. When Rachel meets Cecilia, Celicia confesses to tying to kill Connor. Cecilia tells her that John Paul did it. Celicia later thinks that Rachel won't tell the police about John Paul because Cecilia would tell them about Rachel. And anyway, John Paul has now had his punishment.

There's an epilogue of what-ifs - Janie would have been diagnosed to have a potentially fatal genetic flaw and could have died at any moment. Polly would have gone on to excel at tennis. Tess will have a child - but whose?

Some of the phrasing doesn't sound right to me - "She sometimes thought to herself"; "smiling to himself"; "She noticed that her hand was visibily trembling".

Other reviews

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