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. )
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