The Last Anniversary: A Novel

My 5th read by Liane Moriarty - I can call myself a true fan now! - ended up being yet another fantastic read. The Last Anniversary started off at a more mellow pace compared to her other books, and I almost lost interest after the first chapter on Sophie, the protagonist, when we were doing the flashbacks to Connie & Rose and their secret past. Moriarty is not your typical romance/chick-lit novelist. She really isn't. I am not saying that because I don't see myself as the type to gravitate toward those books. In fact, I'd like to start appreciating ALL genres! But I say it because all her surface-level chick-lit novels (the 5 that I have read: The Husband's Secret, Big Little Lies, The Hypnotist's Love Story, What Alice Forgot and The Last Anniversary) have underlying themes of great depth. Liane Moriarty doesn't just bring a variety of characters to life in order to spice up her novels. She seeps into the subconscious layers of thought and emotion and motive for every character and spits them out with such realness that you forget it's all fictional. She can bring to life an upstanding citizen with a horrible 20-year secret burning inside of him, a beautiful woman, adored by her husband and mother to a gorgeous baby and yet completely suicidal, a detached husband who suddenly fears that his wife may be cheating on him (she isn't), a bereaving mother who disappears into her grief and becomes obsessed with finding and killing the murderer of her child, an irritable teenager, a woman who has lost a decade of her memory and so on. All I can say is that when you start a Moriarty novel, you will not be let down. All of her novels have a great sense of humor, a lightness of heart, a shade of eccentricity and a deep layer of truth. Laughing and crying are guaranteed. Although, with The Last Anniversary, it was mostly a lot of chuckles and hardly any tears, at least for me. Having said all that, The Last Anniversary isn't my favorite novel by her because her later novels are so much more complex and developed and intriguing. You can feel the progression of a great artist in the making. I started with her latest work and went backward. Still, she's pretty awesome. Possible Spoiler Warning: I loved Sophie Honeywell's character. She reminded me of a friend with whom my friendship sadly fell apart, and I'm actually thinking about calling her. Sophie is put in a delicate situation when she inherits a HOUSE in an island from her ex-boyfriend's great aunt, someone she had met only a handful of times. We follow Sophie, who can be described best as the nicest, politest, kindest little charming creature you could imagine, as she moves into Aunt Connie's house and finds herself tangled up with the Munro Baby Mystery. The plot is clever. Very clever. The ending is well-done, and the novel got better and better as I kept reading. As I write this, I'm sitting in the Hong Kong airport lounge, and my next flight is to Sydney, where most of Moriarty's novels are based, including the novelist herself. What fun it would be to make one of her events. I never thought I'd be drawn to a female Australian contemporary novelist, and this experience has shown me that we must be open to reading new genres, new authors, new styles of writing, and let our heart and mind - rather than reviewers or critiques - decide after the fact how we really feel about the work. As for how I feel about Liane Moriarty, she's now ranking in my top most five favorite writers.

I gave this book 4 stars because it held my interest and I felt that Moriarty handled the myriad of characters very well. Most of the details about the book have been covered in other reviews so there is no need for me to repeat those details. The story is told mostly from the point of view of Sophie Honeywell, an outsider of the Scribbly Gum clan, and occasionally switches to the point of view of a different character to foreshadow an important revelation. I disagree with those who said the characters were not likable. I found them to be very likable, for the most part. The Scribbly Gum Island family has been under the thumb of family matriarch, Connie. Her death brings about the changes that the characters experience and allows the unraveling of the mystery. The changes are positive for the individual family members. Connie's absence allows these characters to face the past and their demons and to take positive steps towards a better future. "The truth will set you free" is a true statement for this family. The story touches on many themes, such as postnatal depression and lesbianism, through a cast of quirky and seemingly dysfunctional characters who all impact Sophie’s life in one way or another, as her presence there impacts theirs. The twist surprised me - it was not what I expected. I applaud an author who can surprise me. My only criticism is that the wrap up of the mystery seems a little rushed. Sophie's future is not settled yet the reader is left with the feeling that she will make decisions that are right for her and will have the life she has wanted all along. I was also left with the feeling that the Scribbly Gum clan will live better lives now that their lives are not bound to the twisted mystery of the Monroe baby. Lianne Moriarty is adept at crafting fully realized characters. They are conflicted, vulnerable and capable of surprises. Overall an entertaining, sometimes compelling read with some deeper elements that your average chick-lit book. Definitely worth a read.

I thoroughly enjoyed 75% of this book. The author makes you feel like you are on the island and that you know the people. That being said, the last 25% of the story you start to not care about them. Perhaps the story goes on too long, or maybe, not long enough. The ending is not rewarding. It’s almost like some one else wrote the ending, it’s vague. The book has several storylines involving the family. Only one has a good closure ending. The others, it’s like “they are all happy now” THE END. It’s a good read but your left with “I spent several days reading this book for this!”.

The Last Anniversary is by Liane Moriarty. It is a great book and one that is hard to put down. It deals with family interactions, abandoned babies, biological clocks, and mysteries. Revolving around the Baby Munro mystery, the story develops a life of its own and takes us on a journey we will not forget. Sophie Honeywell is confused when her ex-boyfriend, Thomas Gordon, wants to have lunch with her. Their breakup was unusually harsh. She broke up with him the evening he had meant to surprise her with a trip to Fiji and a marriage proposal. She ruined everything! Now he wants to talk to her? This time, he had to tell her that his Aunt Connie had died and had left her house to Sophie. Though she felt funny doing so, she accepted it after reading a letter Aunt Connie sent her. The house on Scribbly Gum Island now belonged to Sophie. Veronika wanted to contest the will but was persuaded by the other family members not to. Sophie felt at home here and as part of the “family” was expected to take her turn escorting tourists through the Munro home. Alice and Jack Munro had moved into the cottage Rose and Connie’s grandparents had lived. The girls got to know them well. One day they went to visit and found the house ransacked, Alice and Jack gone, and their baby underneath her crib. They decided to keep the child on the island and raise her there. They named her Enigma. The mystery of what happened to Alice and Jack continues to this day. Veronika insists she is going to solve it. As the story continues, the plot thickens. Margie is losing weight but is she having an affair too? Ron is worried she might be. Grace is now home alone with her son Jake; but wonders if she should be. She feels nothing for him. She thinks she is a bad mother and might harm him. Before she leaves, she must find her darling husband a new wife. She decides it should be Sophie. I really liked this book. It kept me on my toes and kept my interest. It was a long book so there are lots of problems and solutions in this book.

Warning: Do not read this book in the vicinity of sleeping babies or people with a nervous disposition. Your frequent spontaneous peals of laughter may startle them. The Last Anniversary is not a new book, but it is presently on the New York Times Bestsellers. It was originally published in Australia in 2005. Apparently interest in it has been revived due to the huge international success of the author’s more recent books. Frankly, as much as I enjoyed her other novels, this is my favorite – so far. Sophie Honeywell is a 39-year-old Sydney, Australia resident who works in human resources. She is the only child of Hans and Gretel Honeywell, a couple with an insatiable sense of fun and bottomless love for life, each other and their daughter. Sophie is a lovely person inside and outside with a sparkling personality who inspires confidence in almost everyone she meets. Three years prior, she broke up a year-long relationship with Thomas Gordon, just seconds before he was going to whisk her away to Fiji in order to propose to her on one of the islands’ white beaches. She was puzzled to hear his voice on the phone, asking to meet for a drink after work. He would only say that someone had died and he really could not say anything further on the phone. At the hotel lounge, Thomas explained that Aunt Connie, the family matriarch, had died in her sleep the day prior. Among the very organized stack of papers she left was a letter addressed to Sophie. Aunt Connie and Sophie had only met briefly two or three times during Thomas time. Aunt Connie and the rest of Thomas’ family lived on Scribbly Gum Island, a suburb of Sydney, across the river, though Thomas himself rarely visited the place when Sophie knew him. The letter from Aunt Connie informs Sophie she is the new owner of her lovely home because she knew Sophie would love and appreciate it. She shares a special memory with Sophie from one of her visits to the island, a small moment that meant literally everything to Aunt Connie. Although Scribbly Gum Island is fictitious, scribbly gums are in fact a type of eucalyptus tree. Moriarty used the very real Parramatta River as the location for her tiny island of six homes. Aunt Connie and Aunt Rose’s grandfather had won the island in a bet with a very wealthy man in the early 20th century. During their childhood, there were two homes – one for grandfather and one for the girls and their parents. Like millions of other people around the world, the Doughty family had a tough time during the Great Depression. Then an incident occurred which was to turn around their bleak circumstances. Alice and Jack Munro had been renting grandfather’s house after he passed away and on one particular day they asked the Doughty girls, teenagers at the time, to stop by for tea. When the girls got to the house, a marble cake was cooling, the tea kettle was whistling, and the Munros were gone, save for their baby girl, nestled in her crib. The sisters took the child home with them, talked their father into letting them keep her. Thus The Munro Baby Mystery is born. Connie, the older of the sisters, had an entrepreneurial mind and a fascination with mysteries, especially the real-life mystery of the Mary Celeste. This was a boat that was found abandoned in the Atlantic, on its way from New York to Italy, all ten people who had been aboard had disappeared. No signs of struggle or violence. Connie draws an analogy between the Mary Celeste and the Munro Baby Mystery and the Munro baby, named Enigma by the Doughtys, became a regional celebrity. Her story becomes the family business, a virtual gold mine. Besides tours of the Munro Home, there are souvenirs, selling the story to the media, and an anniversary festival celebrating the date they found Enigma. By the time Sophie enters the picture, Enigma is grandmother to Thomas, his sister Veronika, and their cousin Grace. She has been a living mystery for 73 years. The emotional ramifications of Connie’s death will rock this rather dysfunctional family to its very core and make this festival marking the discovery of the Munro baby the last anniversary. It is a heck of a ride. The Last Anniversary is filled with Moriarty’s (does Sherlock Holmes pop into your mind?) trademark wit, and her profound insights into human behavior. She tackles some serious issues in this book – adultery, rape and postpartum depression. Grace is a very successful children’s book writer and illustrator who at age 33 has just given birth to 8-week-old baby Jake. She is repulsed by being a mother and by the baby himself. She is convinced that the child does not like her at all. She fears that the maternal dysfunction of her great-grandmother Munro, who abandoned her own baby is in her DNA. She sits and stares at a carton of milk on the table for two hours, unable to move. Because of Grace’s physical beauty and her own reserved personality, no one recognizes the signs and when Callum, her husband, shares with his own mother that Grace is just not herself, he is basically just shushed. Sometimes husbands don’t get enough respect. Only a writer of Moriarty’s caliber and remarkable insight into human behavior could produce novels that cover such hot-button subjects and manage to make the reader laugh, drop kick them in the heart, and yet keep turning the pages. I rated this book 4.25/5.0. This review will be published in the Coastal Breeze News issue of 2/5/2016. [...]

It’s only 3 weeks into 2016 and I just read my favorite book of the year–I think. Well, how can you not love a book that starts out like this? ‘Do you really think we can get away with it?’ ‘If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be suggesting it, would I?’ ‘We could go to jail. That’s my third worst fear. First funnel-webs, then childbirth, then jail.’ ‘Neither of us is going to jail, you ninny. One day we’ll be sweet little old ladies and we’ll probably forget that it didn’t happen the way we said it did.’ ‘I can’t imagine us as sweet little old ladies.’ ‘It does seem unlikely.’ In this one chapter you have mystery, danger, humor and friendship. The novel centers around a mysterious (fake) island called Scribbly Gum Island where in 1932, during the depression, a baby is found alone in a house with a kettle boiling on the stove and a marble cake sitting out. The parents of the baby, Alice and Jack Munro, are missing. Then it fast forward to the present day and all the ramifications from this event. Some people benefited nicely, while others suffered. The author does an amazing job of introducing each character. Although Sophie Honeywell and her love-life or lack there of, is the “main” character. The novel is told in third person omniscient point of view and believe me when I tell you, each character is richly developed. Subjects include: Postpartum depression, mystery, sex, body issues, murder and vibrators. Hey, how can you go wrong? This novel is worth reading alone for the inner and outer dialogue that goes on with Sophie. Which is absolutely hysterical. Not to mention Margie and her two men named Ron which again, is priceless. Will the great mystery be solved? Will Sophie find true love that her Aunt Connie predicted her once she moves into the house where it all began? You’ll just have read it to find out. Published first in 2005 & again in 2014, this is a steal for only $1.99 on kindle. Oh, and add the audio immersion reading to hear the actors speak with Australian accents.

Our story is set in Australia, on Scribbly Gum Island near Sydney. An extended rather dysfunctional family is at the heart of The Last Anniversary , and we quickly meet some of the main players in this drama. Connie and Rose Doughty are the matriarchs and the head of the family business that features the Alice and Jack Munro mystery of 1932. And how Connie and Rose found a baby in a house they were reportedly renting to Alice and Jack...with no sign of the parents. Baby Enigma would become the centerpiece of the mystery and the business, which included tours of the house and anniversaries of the event. The various grown-up children that descended from Enigma and her two daughters, Laura and Margie, were also part of the story. Veronika and Thomas were Margie and Ron's children, while Grace was Laura's daughter. Laura's husband had run off with another woman when Grace was young. Grace and Callum have a new baby, and we learn quite a bit about the two of them, as well as how Grace does not feel like a "proper mother." She often has rages and fears of harming her baby. Meanwhile, Veronika is outraged that Thomas's ex-girlfriend, Sophie Honeywell, has inherited Connie's house after her death. Veronika is an annoying character that suddenly seems to find herself and becomes less hysterical in her behavior. Sophie is another major character and her quest to find her happy ending takes over a good part of the story. What is the true secret behind the Alice and Jack Munro mystery? How did it all come together, and who is responsible? And what somewhat startling final mystery, a secret of Rose's alone, brings the book to a stunning close? I had figured out the secret about the baby early on, at least the general direction of it. But the final reveal was a surprise to me. The celebrations of the mystery spanned seventy-three years until the truth came out. I enjoyed the story, but this was not one of my favorites from this author, as there were too many characters and subplots to fully immerse myself or invest in any of the characters or storylines. But fans of Moriarty will still want to read it. 4.0 stars.

I think Liane Moriarty is a great author and I love her other books, but I was disappointed by this one. I still enjoyed reading it (hence the 3 stars), but it didn't captivate me the way her other books did. The characters in this story lacked dimension and there were too many of them! I usually enjoy stories that are told from multiple points-of-view, but there were entirely too many characters in this story to keep track of. I actually had to draw a family tree of the characters so that I could keep them straight. Because there were so many of them, none of them seemed all that interesting or sympathetic and I didn't really care about their fate, with the exception of one or two. In addition to the lack of multi-dimensional characters, the mystery isn't much of a mystery... it's pretty obvious from the beginning that the sisters had more to do with the disappearances than they let on, and the author alludes to this early on. The story behind the disappearance actually ends up being quite interesting, but you don't read about until the last few pages. The majority of the book is spent describing random events in a group of irritating characters' lives. I still think LM is a great author, and her style of writing is easy and entertaining to read, so I don't regret buying this book. I didn't think her writing was quite as sharp in this book as in her others, but there were still enough moments where her wit and insight shone through to make it an enjoyable read. In conclusion: -If you LOVE Liane Moriarty and have read all her other books, go ahead and read this one because it's not a bad way to pass a few afternoons. -If you were unsure about her other books, don't bother with this one. You'll be upset you wasted your money so move on to a different author! -If you have never read one of her books, I highly suggest you do, but don't start with this one because it's by far the weakest.

Leanne Moriarty captures the atmosphere surrounding her characters and sets them where they tell their individual stories utterly convincingly . This is a book to be enjoyed as you would a beautiful wine, you can savor the sentences for their own sake. The tale unfolds a step at a time as you're led into real familiarity with its participants; I intend to read it again.

This is the first book of Liane Moriarty that I read. I love this book so much.It is funny, a bit suspensful and amazing. I love every character in this book. Looking forward to read more book of this author.

Tardó un poco en atraparme, pero una vez enganchada en la lectura, me encantó. Un libro con temática diferente e importante. Me hizo reír, reflexionar. Recomendable.

A very improbable (and funny!) story written in a way that will make you believe it could happen anytime... Hilarious and relaxing (at least for me). Brilliant job, LM.

Perhaps not quite up to the standard of her other works, but Liane Moriarty does not disappoint, all the same. She combines the same mix of humour (in this case verging on farce) and poignancy in this tale of human foibles and wacky aspiratations, and holds the reader's attention to the end, which is, as usual, unpredictable. Much recommended, given the dearth of really good contemporary fiction writers at present.