"Gravity is the thing" by Jaclyn Moriarty

An audio book

Abigail Sorenson (ex-lawyer, now Happiness Cafe owner in Sidney) has been receiving extracts from a self-help manual written by since she was 15. Now 35, she leaves her 4 y.o. son Oscar with her mother to accept an invitation to 3 days on an island between Australia and Tasmania. 26 other receivers of the extracts are there. She fancies 2 of the men. Wilbur, the tutor, says that some of them will be told the truth at the end. Wilbur says it was his dead parents' wish that people learn/remember how to fly. There will be workshops in Sidney.

At 15, her brother Robert was diagnosed with MS, close to the time when she (nearly a year older than Robert) was dumped by the boy who she lost her virginity with. She started receiving the sample chapters then. She's hoping that solving the mystery of the chapters will somehow solve the mystery of Robert's disappearance. She learns that he took a friend's passport and went to London.

She goes to the workshops. Why do the people continue going? One of them wants to expose it as a scam. Another continues just so they can see Abi again. The tutor Wilbur wonders whether they attend because they feel sorry for him. She and Naill become friendly. He leaves for another town because he didn't think she was serious. But she was.

Finn and she had gone to live in Canada for a while. She tried to get pregnant. He confessed to being in love with a colleague he'd known for years. She had a one-night stand and got pregnant so she returned to Australia.

Wilbur sees her with Oscar in a playground. She asks him how the people were selected for the workshops. He says he chose the sad ones. At the next meeting most people say they're not going to attend any more - they've met someone (at the workshops) or they've resolved their issues. Wilbur tells Abi that he's broken up with her girlfriend of 2 years because she didn't agree with how he was dealing with the grief of losing his parents - rather than carrying out their instructions he should have accepted that they were a bit mad.

Without the workshops, Abi concentrates on the cafe, Oscar and the notion of self-help [the least interesting of the longeurs]. Then she thinks Oscar's swallowed a watch battery. She recalls Lyra on the island saying how dangerous that is. She rushes Oscar to the hospital. Lyra is there. She performs the operation. He's in hospital for 5 weeks. Wilbur visits him. She tells him that all the things that went wrong with her life were her fault. He doesn't agree with the arguments she advances. He really is a flight instructor - he owns a plane. He's decided to throw away his parents' archives. He finds a letter from Robert - he had received a sample chapter too. He wrote that he was going to the North Pole to cure his illness. She follows this clue and finds that he died in Helsinki. She and her parents go through grief again.

The end of the novel is in the future tense. We're warned that it doesn't all happen. She will become a quiet, smiling person, incapable of love. A friend from her Canada times mails her to say that Finn's partner Tia isn't a nice person and that Finn thinks Abi made him the best person he could be. Her eyes and Wilbur's will exchange dreams. They will fly, they will see the rest of the class fly, she will see Robert below, waiting to tell her his story.

I like lots of the writing. Something is brilliant blue, "like a traffic light if it was blue". Something is like "an ice cube tray twisted to release the cubes".

Other reviews

• Theresa Smith (Poor old Wilbur, trying his hardest to honour his parent’s legacy despite the absurdity of it. He really was a special guy and I liked him a lot.)
• Veronika Jordan (There’s a lot of self-discovery and looking inwards and truth-seeking that I hate to admit that I found a bit tedious. It’s all rather flowery and overlong at times. ... About two-thirds of the way through I really began to love and enjoy the story. There’s still a little too much musing)
• acatabookandacupoftea (Abi’s voice has something unusual about it – she’s kind of overly dramatic but also worried about her own mundanity ... There’s a part of this book where you wonder if it’s going to be magical realism, but at its heart this is a novel about people embracing silliness and childishness, and finding themselves once they relax.)
• Jo Nestor (At the start, there’s tremendous levity to Moriarty’s writing: jokey prose, funny stories, amusing asides. Reading it felt like getting to know a new friend; the social behaviours with which newly-met people use humour to engage with one another)