15th Jan 2016

The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty

Redesign_9780425260937_HypnotistsLo_cover.inddThis is another wonderful novel from the fantastic imagination of Liane Moriarty. She’s fast becoming my go-to author when I want a lighter, but beautifully written and thought-provoking read. The lightness here is not meant to be derogatory or infer “light-weight”. On the contrary, it’s not about content or style as Moriarty often deals with difficult topics and doesn’t hesitate in exploring the flaws and weaknesses of human nature and in wonderful prose. Rather, it refers to Moriarty’s deftness as an author and the fact she has what I can only describe as a light touch.

The Hypnostist’s Love Story is no exception. It’s a tale about a young woman named Ellen who has her own hypnotherapy business, helping people overcome addictions, fears and irrational behaviours. When she meets widower and single dad, Patrick, through an online dating service, it seems she’s met the perfect man. Even his son is adorable and both he and Patrick love her. But Patrick comes with more baggage than a dead and beloved wife and her family. Patrick also has a stalker, his ex-girlfriend, Saskia.

Instead of being concerned about what Saskia signifies, especially when she starts turning up at the most inconvenient times and impacting upon the growing relationship she has with Patrick, Ellen is intrigued by Saskia’s obsession and inability to let go. When Saskia starts stalking her as well, Ellen knows she should be afraid, but she’s more curious than anything.

But curiousity is not necessarily a healthy response either – not where grief, jealousy and obsession are involved…and not only Saskia’s…

This is a brilliant and very gratifying book about relationships – personal, professional and familial and all the complex emotions, choices and responses to others we make as we stumble through life, love and loss.

What makes this novel particularly fascinating is Moriarty tells it not only from Ellen’s point of view and through her, Patrick’s, exploring the tension, fear and anxieties being the victim of a stalker can arouse – how damaging it can be – but from Saskia’s as well. This is quite unexpected and though every part of you wants to loathe Saskia, it’s kudos to Moriarty that the reader develops sympathy for her, even though we recoil at her actions. The reader learns about her relationship with Patrick and what led to their break-up. We slowly come to understand if not sympathise with Saskia and her odd and, frankly, inappropriate behaviours – how she cannot stop herself. It doesn’t change the nature of them and how wrong and detrimental they are, but it does put the reader in the stalker’s shoes for a while and allows empathy to flourish.

A really gratifying read that is beautifully and lightly (that word again) told, even though some of the themes are heavy. Having read all Moriarty’s books now, I need her to write another one… stat!

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3rd Jun 2015

The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty

17802724Once more, Liane Moriarty invents a premise for her novel that is quite irresistible. Imagine if, after many years of happy marriage and three children later, you happen upon a letter your husband wrote years ago that states it’s only to be opened on his death. What would you do? Respect the instruction on the front, or break faith and open it?

That is the quandary facing Cecilia Fitzpatrick, one of the most ordered and organised working mothers and wives in the neighbourhood. Respected by other parents at her daughters’ school, well-known and admired within the community, she faces a very real dilemma: what did her husband consider so important that he put it in writing but didn’t want the contents known until after he died?

While this secret is central to the novel, as is usual with Moriarty’s work, she revels in what makes ordinary people tick. What women and men reveal and conceal from each other and even themselves. Intersecting with Cecilia and her husband’s tale is that of Tess, recently moved to Sydney from Melbourne with her young son after her husband drops a bombshell on her.

Tess enrols her son at Cecilia’s children’s school and takes an instant dislike to this together Fitzpatrick woman who seems to have a finger in every pie and a degree of control over her life that Tess can now only dream about.

And then there’s sixty-odd year old Rachel, the woman most don’t know how to speak to and treat her like a china tea-cup or bad luck omen. Afraid if they mention the daughter she lost years ago she might break or if they spend too much time in her company some of the ill fortune (her husband died as well) might rub off, Rachel is both loved and pitied.

But Rachel doesn’t want pity, she wants revenge.

A compulsive read that yet again, kept me up until the wee hours as I had to know how the story was going to resolve itself. Able to make the characters rich, complex and above all real, Moriarty makes the ordinary and every day extraordinary. Wonderful stuff.

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29th May 2015

What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

WhatAliceI’ve been on a bit of a Liane Moriarty binge at the moment, starting with Big Little Lies, then The Last Anniversary, followed by What Alice Forgot. The whole premise of this book is amazing and the subsequent story that unfolds very, very easy to plunge into and difficult to put down.

Alice Love wakes up from a nasty fall in her gym, one that leaves her badly concussed and with a substantial memory loss. In fact, Alice cannot recall the last ten years of her life – as far as she’s concerned, when she wakes up with worried folk bending over her, she’s twenty-nine years old, pregnant with her first child, and besotted with her husband.

Upon awakening, not only does he learn she has three children (whom are complete strangers to her), but she is divorcing her husband and even has a boyfriend. Practically estranged from the sister she was once close to, as Alice’s friends gather to console and help her, aghast and bemused by what’s happened, she starts to realise she doesn’t like some of these people who seem to know her so well, very much.

As the days unfold, Alice begins to learn it’s not only her immediate family and some friends who are foreign to her – the more she learns about the woman she’s become, processes the physical and psychological transformation she appears to have undergone, the more Alice understands the biggest stranger in her life is herself.

The book follows Alice’s journey as she stumbles through what she’s become, tries to reconcile the past ten years with the present and desperately tries to remember how and why she ended up in her present state – divorcing, apparently angry and quite brittle, and someone so different to the person she once was.

Brilliantly conceived and written, I was riveted to the page, wanting to desperately to see how the narrative would resolve itself, what choices Alice, who you both want to remember her past and pray she keep forgetting, makes. You can’t help but ask how you’d feel if the same thing happened? Disappointed in yourself, proud, discontent, regretful, ecstatic? What would you do differently if you could?

As much an exploration of maturation, choices, marriage and family and the various forces that seek to mould and, if we allow them, change us, this is also a romance novel of the best kind – one that plumbs the positives and negatives in all kinds of relationships – from that we have with the opposite and same sex, to that we struggle with as we try to love ourselves.

Witty, heart-wrenching, nail-biting and very clever, I dare you to be able to leave the page.

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28th May 2015

The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty

imgresA wonderful story of secrets, families, hope, regret, relationships and the way in which the actions of past can impinge upon the present from Liane Moriarty. Set on an island (Scribbly Gum) in the Hawkesbury River, New South Wales, Australia, it centres around Sophie Honeywell, a sweet-natured woman who reflects upon her life and decides that because she is in her late thirties, single and childless, she may have made some huge mistakes, including letting the man who asked her to marry him, Thomas Gordon, get away years earlier.

When she is left an extraordinary bequest by Thomas’ Aunt Connie, one that sees her relocating to Scribbly Gum Island and becoming part of the commercial enterprise that is the Munro Baby mystery – a mystery that harkens back to the 1930s when two residents of the island, Alice and Jack Munro dramatically disappeared, leaving behind a baby which the then island residents, Alice and Connie, raised as their own – she is flung back into Thomas’ life and that of his rather eccentric family. Befriending them all over again, Sophie is forced to reassess her life and her opinions of those who both seek to include her in the Munro baby enterprise but also those who feel that as an outsider, she has no right to be on the island and upsetting the status quo.

The longer Sophie stays, the more she begins to understand herself, what she wants from life and the “enigma” that is the Munro mystery.

While this book doesn’t quite have the sophisticated plot and characterisation of Big Little Lies, it is a delightful, light-hearted examination of people and the way we form and maintain or break relationships as well as how decisions made on the spur of the moment can have a huge impact upon the future. Often funny, moving and with a serious side, it’s an easy read and a great way to pass the time. Moriarty paints the characters so well, even the minor ones are three-dimensional and, just like real people, can be alternately annoying, fascinating and adorable. I read this while on holidays and reluctantly tore myself from it. While some of the narrative is predictable, there is a marvellous twist at the end that I never saw coming and found eminently satisfying. Another good read from a simply fabulous writer.

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27th May 2015

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

19486412I don’t know why I resisted reading this book even though I continued to hear good, no, great things about it. Interestingly, much of what I did hear was understated. Rather than claims of ‘it’s fabulous/wonderful/moving/erudite/beautifully written’ (and believe me, this novel is all those things and more), the phrase I heard the most was ‘just read it.’ I also noted that people whose judgment I value rated it their best book of last year.

Finally, early into 2015, I picked up Big Little Lies and the silly notion I’d developed that it was somehow a comic novel rapidly disappeared as I was drawn into the world Moriarty has created and the lives of its fully realized and complicated characters. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some genuinely laugh out loud moments as there would be in a novel centered around three women whose common ground is the school their children attend and the small beachside neighborhood they live in. Anyone with children in primary school forced to interact with other parents knows playground and parental/family politics can be a source of great amusement but also, as a Big Little Lies intricately and accurately maps, painful angst.

Told from multiple points of view, the novel follows part of a school year and three mums whose children are newly enrolled in kindergarten. There is pragmatic ‘I call a spade a spade’ Madeline with her love of bling, glitter and her fierce sense of loyalty and social justice. Then there is her close friend, the extremely beautiful, slightly ethereal and distracted Celeste, mother to rambunctious twin boys with a perfect husband, house and wealth to spare. Finally, there is single-mother, Jane and her beloved young son, new to the area and carrying a great secret.

The narrative unfolds retrospectively, the pivotal moment (*minor spoiler* – it is revealed in the blurb but don’t read on if you don’t want to know) in which time starts to wind back is a murder. Taking us back to the point at which the three women meet, we follow the first tentative steps of friendship as Madeline and Celeste, who are already good friends, take Jane under their wing. This fledgling threesome’s friendship’s bonds are immediately tested and tightened when Jane’s son is accused of something terrible at school (no, not the murder).

Thus the stage is set and what unfolds as the school year progresses and we start to race towards what we already know is going to happen is both the normality and impossibility of the daily life and grind of ordinary people. Moriarty plunges the reader into these women’s lives and the secrets, lies – big and small – and truths of their existence, and that of their children, partners and families, as well as those of the many other characters that pepper and influence their lives. Other voices are given a brief platform from which to speak, serving to draw the reader into the mystery underpinning the entire story: who was killed? Where and why and by whom?

Masterful, evocative and haunting, the novel captures so many of the complexities of relationships: the joy, despair, frustration and fury that can co-exist under one roof between partners, parents and children, as well as those we call friends or acquaintances. It reveals what lies beneath the surface, exposes the facades we powerfully erect and work hard to maintain and why we do this as well. It explores the ways in which and reasons behind certain behaviours, even when we know they’re wrong or wonder what we’re protecting by acting that way – usually, ourselves.

This is a wonderful, chewy novel (by chewy, I mean you find yourself considering so much of what happens and what is said, turning it over and over in your head, thinking scenarios through, in many ways, testing their veracity and asking yourself, would I (or anyone I know) have said/done that) that lingers for ages in the head and heart. It is so believable, the characters so three dimensional and real you want to either slap them, interrupt an argument and add your two bits worth or invite them to a party and get drunk with them.

Absolutely marvelous prose by a brilliant writer whose work I cannot wait to sink my teeth into again and mull over some more. Might be an early call, but could be my best read for 2015…

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