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Liane Moriarty's Apples Never Fall for Guardian Australia book review September 2021

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty review – overgarnished but pyrotechnic family drama

A missing grandmother is at the heart of this perfectly readable but indulgent new mystery from the mordant queen of Sydney suburbia

E veryone is listening. Cafe waiters are eavesdropping from behind their ordering pads; baristas over the hiss of the espresso machine. Cleaners are mopping up secrets in house after house. Uber drivers can’t help but overhear; pedicurists too. And loyal hairdressers have decades of stories to share – all that tactile intimacy.

In Liane Moriarty’s new novel, Apples Never Fall, a mystery unfolds in snippets and whispers – a suspected murder, a missing body – but every witness has their own story: exams to sit, bills to pay, Tinder dates to preen for, the loneliness of widowhood. They hear what they hear because, in service jobs, they’re treated as invisible – as inert and functional as furniture. Our loose-lipped cast might not notice them, but Moriarty sure does.

Moriarty has an eye for gentrified grotesqueries: retail hubs trussed up as Tuscan villages (“at least the fake cobblestones didn’t catch heels like real cobblestones”); memoir classes in which women in “tailored pants and pearl earrings” craft tales of woe on creamy new stationery; leafy streets patrolled by designer dogs, and double strollers as expensive as cars. There’s a reason she’s the mordant queen of Sydney suburbia.

Until this novel – her ninth – I knew Moriarty’s books only by reputation and buzz from the prestige television adaptations of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers : Nicole Kidman in various shades of aloof. When the galley of Apples Never Fall landed on my doorstep with its 500 pages of wallop, I was primed for a tale of lily-white affluence and its discontents: weaponised gossip, class frictions and the occasional untimely death; a harbour view, perhaps. Moriarty’s trademarks are certainly present, but there’s something else in here – something quiet and clenched – that’s overshadowed by her book’s more salacious trimmings.

In a neighbourhood of “nicely modulated voices” and well-tended gardens, aspiring grandmother and fearsome doubles player Joy Delaney has gone missing. Her husband Stan is suspiciously scratched-up. He blames a vengeful hedge, but the neighbours – ears ever-pricked – heard the pair arguing the night before she disappeared. For more than 40 years, Joy and Stan ran the local tennis school (“Joy made the money and Stan made the stars”) while they lustily produced four enormous, tennis-crazy children (now embittered, tennis-averse adults). But the couple have recently retired and, relieved of all their hectic obligations, their marriage has curdled. “Maybe every marriage had secret cracks that could turn into chasms,” Moriarty ponders. Or maybe the signs were there all along.

The Delaney family is a magnificent snarl of allegiances and grievances, unsalved wounds and intergenerational chafing. There’s churlish, hulking Stan, who once unearthed a Grand Slam champion, only to be cast aside when the kid hit the big time; and the ever-fractious sibling quartet – blue-haired Amy, morally slippery Troy, pathologically laid-back Logan, and Brooke with an e – not one of them a tennis prodigy, nor able to forget it. Joy is forever in the middle, her brood’s peacekeeper-in-chief. She could have made it to Wimbledon, but sacrificed her talent on the altar of family.

When Moriarty plonks us down at the dinner table, her pages are pyrotechnic. The writer turns a Father’s Day lunch into a deliciously theatrical centrepiece – a buffet of bruised egos. There’s Olympic-level bickering, a chocolate brownie duel. Every short Delaney fuse is lit and fizzing, and we can only wait to see who will detonate first. All that emotional shrapnel whizzing past our ears. But farce slips into domestic horror: as the days turn to weeks with no sign of Joy, the children must grapple with the hardening probability that their father has murdered their mother. “Sometimes when she pulled out a funny memory from their shared childhood,” the eldest Delaney daughter, Amy, reflects, “it turned out to be not so funny after all.”

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If Moriarty had kept the aperture narrowed – a portrait of a family riven by new suspicions and old rivalries – Apples Never Fall would have been a subtle tale of everyday violence. The ways women are incrementally eroded; the ways men are taught to harness their rage. All the ecstasies and cruelties of elite sports (not to mention its striving parents). But Moriarty wraps her family in a glossier mystery: a young woman arrives on the Delaney doorstep in the dead of night, bruised, bloodied and in need of shelter. Grand revelations brew; ornate revenge.

It’s a restless, rambling subplot that relies, dispiritingly, on a wearying and pernicious shock tactic: a vixenish schemer who cries wolf, faking her claim of intimate partner violence (“another girl’s awful truth at the heart of her awful lie”). That Moriarty’s characters are well aware of the trope – and trust their interloper more readily because of it – makes it all the more grotesque and lazy.

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.

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Liane Moriarty’s New Novel Is a Family Saga and a Mystery

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review book apples never fall

By Ivy Pochoda

  • Sept. 12, 2021

APPLES NEVER FALL By Liane Moriarty

I couldn’t quite square the title of Liane Moriarty’s new novel, “Apples Never Fall,” with the family story it unfurls. When we meet the Delaneys — petite, spunky Joy and her hulking bear of a husband, Stan, both former Australian tennis stars — they’ve logged nearly 50 years of a passionate yet complex marriage. Their union seems perfect both on and off the court — that is, until Joy goes missing a few months before her 70th birthday.

For decades, the Delaneys dominated mixed doubles and celebrated their wins with rowdy displays of affection that raised eyebrows in the clubhouse. But after selling their tennis academy they’ve had too much energy and too little purpose. While Stan simmers in front of the television, Joy putters about, baffled by her four towering, worrisome children, whose failure to produce a single offspring enrages her. The kids have disappointed Stan too. Despite their athletic prowess none of them made it to center court at Wimbledon — a tall order, if you ask me. The senior Delaneys may have been inspired and crafty on court, but at home they give in to crude laments that their apples have fallen so far afield.

Despite their occasional mind-blowing sex — Moriarty is wonderfully generous with septuagenarian passion — there’s something rotten at the core of this marriage, something having to do with Stan’s former protégé Harry Haddad — a Grand Slam champion on the comeback trail who is about to release a memoir. Harry, a rival of the younger Delaneys both on the court and for their father’s affection, defected from their parents’ academy at the age of 17 to train at Tennis Australia, breaking Stan’s heart. No one, it seems, likes Harry.

As in her best-selling “Big Little Lies,” Moriarty toggles back and forth between present and past, between the search for Joy and the period before her disappearance when a mysterious young woman named Savannah turned up on the Delaneys’ doorstep. (She was on the run from an abusive boyfriend, or so she claimed.) Thrilled by her obsessive attention to them and oblivious to her game plan, the couple moved Savannah into their house. Why their kids weren’t equally excited by the girl’s presence, Stan and Joy couldn’t quite fathom — although as their fellow Aussies might say, it’s bleeding obvious.

As furious as the Delaney children were about the family interloper, they remain oddly blasé about their mother’s disappearance. “Our mother is possibly missing,” one of them tells an eavesdropping waitress. “We have temporarily mislaid our mother.” Even as the clues pile up, Joy’s vanishing seems more curious than urgent — a signal that if you’re expecting the Night Stalker, you won’t find him in this Sydney suburb. And while there is indeed an investigation into Joy’s disappearance, it feels more like an afterthought than a pressing matter, perhaps just an excuse for introducing a little ethnic diversity in the form of two detectives. (Moriarty often gives issues of race a sidelong glance while parsing the class distinctions among whites with razor-sharp precision.)

Where she excels is in the way all of her characters spring from the page so fully formed that I would feel comfortable selecting their clothes, ordering their meals and guessing their attitudes toward the newest releases on Netflix. The Delaney kids might seem to be stock figures — Amy, the troubled artsy one; Troy, the philandering highflier; Brooke, the driven businesswoman unlucky in love; and Logan, the sloppy bro with a heart of gold — but Moriarty layers them with experiences, mistakes and struggles that give them dimension.

While “Apples Never Fall” may follow the same playbook as Moriarty’s previous novels, it lacks the nasty delights of “Nine Perfect Strangers” and the simmering class and sexual tension of “Big Little Lies.” Since I am a sucker for a juicy sports novel, I’d hoped the pressure cooker of competitive tennis would heat things up, but Moriarty keeps the game offstage. “Apples Never Fall” is essentially two novels rolled into one — a wifty tale of domestic suspense, and a satisfying, layered family drama where the tension comes from the treachery of memory, the specter of generational violence and the effects of decades’ worth of unspoken resentments that have curdled over time. The real standout here is Joy. Just as she did with the sharp yet gullible Frances Welty in “Nine Perfect Strangers” (as superb a depiction of a novelist as you will find in contemporary fiction), Moriarty once again shows her mastery with the inner working of women of a certain age — their acuity, experience and ugly thoughts.

Initially, I was inclined to underestimate Joy. How disappointing that this once fierce tennis star has been reduced to a passive base-liner in her own home, patty-caking away her husband’s stubborn sullenness, deflecting all conflict and losing confidence in her own skills, worried that “her frontal lobe was atrophying.” But Moriarty proves to be subtle, sly and one step ahead of skeptics: Joy’s passivity is the story’s latent engine, masking her secrets and her secret resentments. Stan, too, is more than he seems. I was too quick to write him off as a typical brooding, moody former coach, looking back on the not-so-good old days with a disappointed eye. As the Delaney children begin to re-examine their parents’ marriage, we discover a depth to Stan’s silences and a wrenching rationale to his distance.

While Stan and Joy’s relationship is revealed with unerring precision, Moriarty stumbles with Savannah, the purported villainess. She’s a blurry psychopath, sometimes a cunning little vixen, sometimes a sad grifter, sometimes a damaged child. When the truth about her connection to the Delaneys comes to light, it seems both unbelievable and undercooked. Suffice to say, she has a small, irrelevant ax to grind.

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. If it is the bad habit of many modern readers (I am one) to expect or even to crave violence, Moriarty is not here to fulfill that wish, nor should she be. But after nearly 400 pages of cliffhangers, I was hoping for a resolution with a little more bite. What Moriarty is after is something else altogether. She ends with revelations that love is hard, mistakes are necessary and betrayals large and small are unavoidable facts of family life. And indeed, apples do fall far from their trees, as they should.

Ivy Pochoda’s most recent novel is “These Women.”

APPLES NEVER FALL By Liane Moriarty 480 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $28.99.

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In Liane Moriarty’s ‘Apples Never Fall,’ a mother disappears and a family falls to pieces

review book apples never fall

On the cover of “ Apples Never Fall ,” Australian novelist Liane Moriarty’s ninth book, there are four gorgeous red fruits. These symbolize the four children of Stan and Joy Delaney, a couple whose work and family lives became intertwined after they founded a sought-after tennis academy beside their suburban Sydney home.

Liane Moriarty writes women’s fiction. Have a problem with that? She doesn’t.

Sadly, that combination didn’t play out as Stan and Joy had hoped. As the siblings become adults, disappointments and dysfunction abound, with family members volleying grievances across the Sunday lunch table as fast and furious as their home-court matches of old. Stan and Joy had their own troubled upbringings, but there are a few positive associations, including Grandma’s apple crumble, a dessert so legendary the Delaneys have tried for years to find a reproduction of the one Stan’s late mother used to make. (“Trust the old bag to never share her secret recipe,” Joy thinks. “One day someone would work out the missing single ingredient and then she’d be properly dead.”)

‘Nine Perfect Strangers’: Liane Moriarty is back with another page-turner

Metaphor alert! The Delaney family will soon crumble, too. After Stan and Joy offer shelter to Savannah, a stranger who shows up at their doorstep disheveled and bleeding, the siblings sense a scam. Their parents play strong doubles, though, insisting Savannah is “staying with us for as long as she wants .” But when Joy disappears on Valentine’s Day, it’s Stan everyone suspects, and “everyone” includes their children.

Moriarty excels in unpeeling characters’ psyches, and here she begins with those twitchy, angry children, their individual relationships with their hard-driving “tennis parents” a source of seething angst for all. Even paterfamilias Stan has a tennis loss that rankles: a onetime top seed named Harry Haddad who ditched the family for another coach.

But if there’s one character with whom the author succeeds, it’s 69-year-old Joy, who has, like many women of her boomer generation, tried to be everything to everybody and now feels like she succeeded at nothing. “ ‘Regret’ can be my memoir’s theme, she thought, as she tried to shove the cheese grater into the dishwasher next to the frying pan. A Regretful Life by Joy Delaney.” Her husband and children raged around her, expecting her to pick up the pieces every time — and she did. As the Delaney siblings, Amy, Brooke, Logan and Troy, try to discover what happened to their mother, readers learn how essential she was to her family, especially to Stan, who lurches around his house after her disappearance like a wounded bear.

‘Big Little Lies,’ by Liane Moriarty, reveals parents’ ugly secrets in quiet Aussie town

If Moriarty stumbles at all in this story, it’s at the end when she brings us back into Savannah’s orbit, where things get overlong and a bit convoluted. That’s a shame, because it’s also when we learn what the title is all about, a powerful reminder that parental love and attention do matter over time. Moriarty does know how to combine a family saga with a mystery; she’s done it before (e.g. “ The Husband’s Secret ”). What she has more trouble with may be balancing hope with hopelessness, never an easy task.

But that lapse isn’t all that important. Moriarty tells a great story, understands her characters and cares about them, too. Readers who have kept up with her books will adore “Apples Never Fall,” and readers just discovering Moriarty will seek out her previous titles after savoring this fresh, juicy tale.

Bethanne Patrick  is the editor, most recently, of “The Books That Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians and Other Remarkable People.”

Apples Never Fall

By Liane Moriarty

Henry Holt and Co. 480 pp. $28.99

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New York Times Bestseller

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APPLES NEVER FALL

by Liane Moriarty ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2021

Funny, sad, astute, occasionally creepy, and slyly irresistible.

Australian novelist Moriarty combines domestic realism and noirish mystery in this story about the events surrounding a 69-year-old Sydney woman’s disappearance.

Joy and Stan Delaney met as champion tennis players more than 50 years ago and ran a well-regarded tennis academy until their recent retirement. Their long, complicated marriage has been filled with perhaps as much passion for the game of tennis as for each other or their children. When Joy disappears on Feb. 14, 2020 (note the date), the last text she sends to her now-grown kids—bohemian Amy, passive Logan, flashy Troy, and migraine-suffering Brooke—is too garbled by autocorrect to decipher and stubborn Stan refuses to accept that there might be a problem. But days pass and Joy remains missing and uncharacteristically silent. As worrisome details come to light, the police become involved. The structure follows the pattern of Big Little Lies (2014) by setting up a mystery and then jumping months into the past to unravel it. Here, Moriarty returns to the day a stranger named Savannah turned up bleeding on the Delaneys’ doorstep and Joy welcomed her to stay for an extended visit. Who is Savannah? Whether she’s innocent, scamming, or something else remains unclear on many levels. Moriarty is a master of ambiguity and also of the small, telling detail like a tossed tennis racket or the repeated appearance of apple crumble. Starting with the abandoned bike that's found by a passing motorist on the first page, the evidence that accumulates around what happened to Joy constantly challenges the reader both to notice which minor details (and characters) matter and to distinguish between red herrings and buried clues. The ultimate reveal is satisfying, if troubling. But Moriarty’s main focus, which she approaches from countless familiar and unexpected angles, is the mystery of family and what it means to be a parent, child, or sibling in the Delaney family—or in any family, for that matter.

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-250-22025-7

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021

THRILLER | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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by Alex Michaelides ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2024

More style than substance.

Michaelides takes a literary turn in his latest novel, employing an unreliable narrator, the structure of classical drama, and a self-conscious eye to dismantling the locked-room mystery.

The novel starts off with a murder, and with seven people trapped on an isolated Greek island lashed by a "wild, unpredictable Greek wind." The narrator, soon established as Elliot Chase, then zooms out to address the reader directly, introducing the players—most importantly movie star Lana Farrar. We meet her husband, Jason Miller, her son, Leo, and her friend Kate Crosby, a theater actress. We learn about her rise to fame and her older first husband, Otto Krantz, a Hollywood producer. We learn about Kate’s possibly stalling career and Leo’s plan to apply to acting schools against his mother’s wishes. We learn about Jason’s obsession with guns. And in fragments and shards, we learn about Elliot: his painful childhood; his May–September relationship with an older female writer, now dead; his passion for the theater, where he learned “to change everything about [himself]” to fit in. Though he isn't present in every scene, he conveys each piece of the story leading up to the murder as if he were an omniscient narrator, capable of accessing every character's interior perspective. When he gets to the climax, there is, indeed, a shooting. There is, indeed, a motive. And there is, of course, a twist. The atmosphere of the novel, set mostly on this wild Greek island, echoes strongly the classical tragedies of Greece. The characters are types. The emotions are operatic. And the tragedy, of course, leads us to question the idea of fate. Michaelides seems also to be dipping into the world of Edgar Allan Poe, offering an unreliable narrator who feels more like a literary exercise. As an exploration of genre, it’s really quite fascinating. As a thriller, it’s not particularly surprising.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2024

ISBN: 9781250758989

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Celadon Books

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

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review book apples never fall

Review: Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

review book apples never fall

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty is a unique mystery and family drama.

Liane Moriarty is one of my favorite authors. Earlier this year, I ranked her best books and it was a lot of fun to take a look back at some of her previous novels. She already has such an impressive career! She’s written all kinds of novels and of course, is most popular for Big Little Lies , followed closely by Nine Perfect Strangers . I think it’s so neat that her novels are adapted for television. I personally love Big Littles Lies but was not a fan of Nine Perfect Strangers (which made me sad because I truly adore her writing).

Even though Nine Perfect Strangers was a disappointment, I’m been so looking forward to Apples Never Fall . I had a feeling that this was going to be a good one and I really enjoyed it. I did have some minor issues with it but overall, I think this was an entertaining and somewhat emotional read at times. And of course it’s full of her dark humor.

What’s the Story About

The story follows a very competitive family full of tennis players. The Delaneys are mainstays in the community. The parents, Stan and Joy, ran a tennis academy for years and now that they’ve sold it, they’re a bit at a lost of what to do next. It’s also debatable if they’re still in love or actually hate each other.

They have four adult children—Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke. Each were tennis stars but none of them made it to the big-time league. While tennis always lingers in the background they’ve also all moved on for the most part. Troy is super successful financial wealthy guy who is both overall confident and completely scared; Brooke just started her own medical practice but suffers from migraines; Logan teaches business at a local community college and seems content but is lying to himself and Amy acts younger than her age with her blue hair and is always on the move but also deals with anxiety and is potentially bipolar.

But one night, a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy’s door, changing the course of everyone’s life forever. Eventually Joy goes missing and Stan is the primary suspect.

Where is Joy? Is Stan guilty of murder? And what are Savannah’s true motives?

Family Drama

So I read Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Malibu Rising earlier this year, which also feature four siblings. And what I liked about that one was the fact she really dived into the siblings’ relationships. I think Liane could have focused a little more on how the siblings related to each other as adults. It is there and it’s enough but I did want a little more—especially when you’re dealing with four of them and how they all were involved in tennis. But again, I did think they were interesting.

With Liane, you get an in-depth character study of each character—even minor ones that appear on a page for just a bit. We really dive deep into Joy and Stan’s complicated marriage from being madly in love to outright hate. I felt that Liane did a good job showing how a marriage can slowly unravel and minor grievances can build up over time.

I have complicated feelings about the Savannah character. She definitely throws this family a curveball and I’m still processing all her reveals. But what I will say is that she’s unique and her backstory was quite unexpected.

The overall mystery of what happened to Joy is interesting and goes down unexpected paths.

I’m a huge sports fan (if you follow my Twitter, you’ll notice I post plenty of OU football content this time of year). But I have to say, I don’t care that much for tennis. Not that I actively dislike it but just not interested. But I was engaged with this story about a tennis family, especially as I found their actions bizarre in many ways. The competitiveness is something else that’s for sure. Liane really did her research on the sport and what it takes to be successful.

It’s interesting how the love for tennis defines and also defies them in many ways.

Apples Never Fall is an ideal book club book—there’s so much to discuss and dissect. I can see some readers not loving story choices whereas others completely support it. This one is a complicated novel that is well-written and engaging. I highly recommend! For book clubs, check out my discussion questions here .

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Review: Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

  • Post published: March 1, 2022
  • Post last modified: November 6, 2022

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning that if you buy something, I might earn a small commission from that sale at no cost to you. As always, my links support indie bookstores. Read my full disclosure  here .   Thank you for your support.

Content warnings for  Apples Never Fall  provided at the bottom of this post, for those who would find them useful. You can find  further details on content warnings here .

I’ve also written a review for Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty .

Apples Never Fall by liane Moriarty summary

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

If your mother was missing, would you tell the police? Even if the most obvious suspect was your father? This is the dilemma facing the four grown Delaney siblings. The Delaneys are fixtures in their community. The parents, Stan and Joy, are the envy of all of their friends. They’re killers on the tennis court, and off it their chemistry is palpable. But after fifty years of marriage, they’ve finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. So why are Stan and Joy so miserable? The four Delaney children–Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke–were tennis stars in their own right, yet as their father will tell you, none of them had what it took to go all the way. But that’s okay, now that they’re all successful grown-ups and there is the wonderful possibility of grandchildren on the horizon. One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy’s door, bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend. The Delaneys are more than happy to give her the small kindness she sorely needs. If only that was all she wanted. Later, when Joy goes missing, and Savannah is nowhere to be found, the police question the one person who remains: Stan. But for someone who claims to be innocent, he, like many spouses, seems to have a lot to hide. Two of the Delaney children think their father is innocent, two are not so sure–but as the two sides square off against each other in perhaps their biggest match ever, all of the Delaneys will start to reexamine their shared family history in a very new light.

Apples Never Fall by liane Moriarty review

Apples Never Fall was so overhyped by the bookclub scene that I really didn’t have this on my TBR list. Another Mom drama, right? About a neighborhood struggling with mundane issues that entertain, but you’ll forget about when the next one comes along. But boy was this another reminder to not judge a book by its cover (and to give mom bookclubs a bit more credit).

I like a good true crime podcast-esque story. (Check out my review of The Anatomy of Desire by L.R. Dorn if you do, too — these books actually are similar in that way.) So the missing mother situation really did pique my interest. The story unravels in a way that keeps you glued to the page, filled with both satisfying moments of knowing more than the characters do and twists you couldn’t predict.

There were a million Oh, of course! moments in the last quarter or so of the book — Moriarty proved to be an expert when it comes to logic threading, and there are few abilities I admire more when it comes to storytelling.

One reason it reminded me so much of The Anatomy of Desire by L.R. Dorn is all the little vignette-like moments that make up the story. The reader gets much of their information from side characters — a waitress, a hairdresser. For a brief moment we are dipped into their world, and inevitably they have thoughts on the missing persons case in their town, but these little POV switches also feel realistic in that the Joy Delaney disappearance isn’t the only thing taking up their mental space — sometimes it is only just an aside.

For example, one of our main side characters is a female police officer assigned to the case, and although she is obviously focused on her job, she also makes observations that are relevant to the story in a way only the reader recognizes.

The only part that felt a little unbelievable about Apples Never Fall was the amount of times phone conversations are overheard — so much sensitive information this publicly and loudly felt off. But honestly, I’ll forgive it, because the result was just so darn good.

Want more Liane Moriarty? Check out my review of her other book, Nine Perfect Strangers , which was recently adapted by Hulu.

Alright, that’s it for now! Chat later,

review book apples never fall

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty was released September 14, 2021.   Although Henry Holt & Co. and  libro.fm  provided me with a free review copy, this did not in any way affect my review.

CW: Mental illness, rape and sexual assault, abuse (physical, mental, emotional, verbal, sexual), child abuse, self-harm and eating disorders, death or dying, kidnapping and other events that might be considered traumatic, pregnancy/child birth

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#BookReview Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty @HenryHolt #ApplesNeverFall #LianeMoriarty

#BookReview Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty @HenryHolt #ApplesNeverFall #LianeMoriarty

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Liane Moriarty comes a novel that looks at marriage, siblings, and how the people we love the most can hurt us the deepest

The Delaney family love one another dearly—it’s just that sometimes they want to murder each other . . .

If your mother was missing, would you tell the police? Even if the most obvious suspect was your father?

This is the dilemma facing the four grown Delaney siblings.

The Delaneys are fixtures in their community. The parents, Stan and Joy, are the envy of all of their friends. They’re killers on the tennis court, and off it their chemistry is palpable. But after fifty years of marriage, they’ve finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. So why are Stan and Joy so miserable?

The four Delaney children—Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke—were tennis stars in their own right, yet as their father will tell you, none of them had what it took to go all the way. But that’s okay, now that they’re all successful grown-ups and there is the wonderful possibility of grandchildren on the horizon.

One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy’s door, bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend. The Delaneys are more than happy to give her the small kindness she sorely needs. If only that was all she wanted.

Later, when Joy goes missing, and Savannah is nowhere to be found, the police question the one person who remains: Stan. But for someone who claims to be innocent, he, like many spouses, seems to have a lot to hide. Two of the Delaney children think their father is innocent, two are not so sure—but as the two sides square off against each other in perhaps their biggest match ever, all of the Delaneys will start to reexamine their shared family history in a very new light.

Simmering, cunning, and cleverly intricate!

Apples Never Fall is a compelling, character-driven, domestic thriller that takes you into the lives of the Delaney family as they each grapple with sibling rivalry, enduring jealousy, resentments, and long-buried secrets when their matriarch disappears one day leaving behind only a garbled text message and a husband who seems suspiciously guilty of her murder.

The writing is crisp and tight. The characters are envious, secretive, and troubled. And the plot told using a mixture of narrative, police interviews, and alternating timelines, before-and-after the incident is a mysterious tale full of well-timed twists, unforeseen surprises, red herrings, deception, insecurities, and a whole slew of quirky, eccentric personalities.

Overall,   Apples Never Fall  is another addictive, astute, tragically comedic tale by Moriarty that highlights once again her innate ability to delve into all the messy psychological and emotional entanglements that exist between family members and is definitely worthy of its spot on everyone’s must-read list this fall.

This novel is available now.

Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from one of the following links.

review book apples never fall

Thank you to Henry Holt and Company for providing me with a copy of this story in exchange for an honest review.

About Liane Moriarty

review book apples never fall

Liane Moriarty is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Big Little Lies, The Husband’s Secret, and Truly Madly Guilty; the New York Times bestsellers Nine Perfect Strangers, What Alice Forgot, and The Last Anniversary; The Hypnotist’s Love Story; and Three Wishes. She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two children.

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2 Comments on #BookReview Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty @HenryHolt #ApplesNeverFall #LianeMoriarty

Great review Zoe, this one sounds right up my alley. I enjoy well written domestic thriller.

I am looking forward to this book and I liked Big Little Lies. Thanks for the review, Zoe

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, apples never fall.

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Bestselling author Liane Moriarty returns with APPLES NEVER FALL, a scandalous, page-turning novel about the secrets that threaten to tear apart even the most solid unions --- marriage, parenthood, siblinghood --- and whether or not any of us can ever really remember the past perfectly. Infused with the author’s trademark blend of tension and emotional insight, this book is as intelligent as it is compulsively readable.

The Delaneys are fixtures in their Sydney suburb. Joy and Stan are expert tennis players who used their talents to kickstart a famous tennis academy that not only trained professional players in their early years, but gave their community a place to turn to for sportsmanship, connection and family-friendly fun. Their four children, all former tennis stars, are now successful grownups, each with their own careers, relationships and memories of their childhood spent on the courts.

Now in their late 60s, Joy and Stan have sold their beloved academy and are struggling to adapt to their new roles as retirees. Joy, with her entrepreneurial spirit, has trouble winding down and instead immerses herself in educational podcasts so she can impress her children with her knowledge of their illnesses and careers. Stan, the archetypal sports coach, has turned to watching TV and monitoring the rise of his estranged star student, Harry Haddad.

"With perfectly rendered characters that anchor you to the more explosive, shocking portions of the plot, this is an utterly gripping thrill ride of reveals, betrayals and alliances that is as gobsmacking as it is emotional."

When we meet the Delaney siblings, we begin with free-spirited, possibly mentally ill Amy, who is perpetually between jobs, relationships and housing; non-confrontational, complacent Logan, who recently separated from his longtime girlfriend; pompous, wealthy Troy, who splits his time between New York City and Sydney; and physical therapist Brooke, the baby and apple of her father’s eye, the only one he deems a real success for her chosen career’s nearness to sports, though no one knows her marriage is on the brink of divorce.

The children have remained close throughout their adult years, but the reason for their most recent reunion is not a happy one: their mother has gone missing. Even stranger, their father seems unconcerned, even readily admitting that the two fought just before Joy disappeared. As they try to figure out where their mother is, they each recount the last year of their lives, a year fraught with tension, mysterious characters and hard-hitting recollections of their childhoods.

The chapters alternate between the present day and one year earlier, when a young stranger appears on Joy and Stan’s doorstep bloodied and bruised, claiming to have been abused by her boyfriend. The Delaneys have taught many children over the years, so the appearance of a random girl is not terribly unusual. But Savannah claims to have no idea who they are. With little else to occupy their time as retirees, they welcome her into their home, taking advantage of the feeling of a full house after so many years without their own children and no promise of grandchildren on the horizon (something Joy fixates on, though Stan seems ambivalent to the idea of becoming a grandparent). Though their children are initially wary of the battered girl, they eventually warm up to her. Yet one year later, she is completely gone from the picture. It seems impossible that there is no connection between Savannah and Joy vanishing into thin air.

Amy, Logan, Troy and Brooke each grapple with their father’s potential role in their mother’s disappearance. True, he is acting suspiciously, but he has never been violent, and their parents have always been visibly, happily in love. Or have they? Close in age but entirely different in spirit and countenance, each Delaney child seems to have their own idea of their mother, their father and their parents’ marriage. At the same time, they start to realize that while their parents could read their games with perfect accuracy, predicting every shot and planning for every weakness, Joy and Stan were often clueless about their feelings, blinded by a shared love of tennis and the Delaney family legacy on the court. As each child unpacks their own history, their siblings’ history and their father’s possible motive, the Delaneys divide into halves: two children certain that their father is innocent and two just uncertain enough to question everything they thought was true about their family.

What an absolute rollercoaster this book is! Liane Moriarty is a truly gifted writer, perhaps the keenest observer of the human condition writing today, and her ability to peel back the layers of the mostly stereotypical characters (the overachieving daughter, the pompous son, the hard-hearted coach) and find out exactly what makes them tick is unparalleled. The notion of using four adult children, all raised with strict guidelines for success, as protagonists becomes totally fresh in Moriarty’s hands, as each child is written clearly and vividly. Reading about Amy, Logan, Troy and Brooke (and their parents, of course) through one another’s eyes, we get a complete picture of each character, including, most importantly, the things they hide from one another and refuse to admit about themselves.

Exuberant, cleverly constructed and emotionally taut, APPLES NEVER FALL is a damning, eye-opening portrait of a family, as well as a reminder that growing pains are not limited to any age. With perfectly rendered characters that anchor you to the more explosive, shocking portions of the plot, this is an utterly gripping thrill ride of reveals, betrayals and alliances that is as gobsmacking as it is emotional. Adapting any of Moriarty’s novels for the screen seems like an obvious choice, but if anyone in Hollywood is reading this review, believe me, this one needs to be next.

Reviewed by Rebecca Munro on September 24, 2021

review book apples never fall

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

  • Publication Date: July 19, 2022
  • Genres: Fiction , Mystery , Psychological Suspense , Psychological Thriller , Suspense , Thriller , Women's Fiction
  • Paperback: 480 pages
  • Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
  • ISBN-10: 1250220270
  • ISBN-13: 9781250220271

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Apples Never Fall : Book summary and reviews of Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

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Apples Never Fall

by Liane Moriarty

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

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Published Sep 2021 480 pages Genre: Thrillers Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers comes a novel that looks at marriage, siblings, and how the people we love the most can hurt us the deepest.

The Delaney family love one another dearly―it's just that sometimes they want to murder each other... If your mother was missing, would you tell the police? Even if the most obvious suspect was your father? This is the dilemma facing the four grown Delaney siblings. The Delaneys are fixtures in their community. The parents, Stan and Joy, are the envy of all of their friends. They're killers on the tennis court, and off it their chemistry is palpable. But after fifty years of marriage, they've finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. So why are Stan and Joy so miserable? The four Delaney children―Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke―were tennis stars in their own right, yet as their father will tell you, none of them had what it took to go all the way. But that's okay, now that they're all successful grown-ups and there is the wonderful possibility of grandchildren on the horizon. One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy's door, bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend. The Delaneys are more than happy to give her the small kindness she sorely needs. If only that was all she wanted. Later, when Joy goes missing, and Savannah is nowhere to be found, the police question the one person who remains: Stan. But for someone who claims to be innocent, he, like many spouses, seems to have a lot to hide. Two of the Delaney children think their father is innocent, two are not so sure―but as the two sides square off against each other in perhaps their biggest match ever, all of the Delaneys will start to reexamine their shared family history in a very new light.

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Media Reviews

Reader reviews.

"Moriarty is a master of ambiguity and also of the small, telling detail...Funny, sad, astute, occasionally creepy, and slyly irresistible." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "[An] engrossing psychological thriller...Moriarty expertly delves into the innermost thoughts of each of the children, exposing secrets unbeknownst to each other; artfully balances the present-day plot with revealing backstory; and offers several different possibilities for what happened to Joy. Only the overlong conclusion disappoints. Moriarty's superb storytelling continues to shine." - Publishers Weekly "I loved it. An absolute page-turner with all the wit and nuance that put Liane Moriarty head and shoulders above the crowd. Liane Moriarty shows once again why she leads the pack." - Jane Harper, New York Times bestselling author of The Dry and The Survivors

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Liane Moriarty Author Biography

review book apples never fall

Liane was born in Sydney, Australia in the spring of 1966. It was a beautiful day, according to her mother, who has an excellent memory for weather. A few hours after Liane was born she smiled directly at her father through the nursery glass window, which is remarkable, seeing as most babies can't even focus their eyes at that age. Her first word was 'glug'. This was faithfully recorded in the baby book kept by her mother. As the eldest of six children, Liane was the only one to get a baby book so she likes to refer to it often. She can't remember the first story she ever wrote, but she does remember her first publishing deal. Her father 'commissioned' her to write a novel for him and offered an advance of $1. She had no agent, so accepted his first offer and wrote a three volume ...

... Full Biography Link to Liane Moriarty's Website

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Book Review of APPLES NEVER FALL

Book cover of APPLES NEVER FALL

Ugh . I can’t believe I’m writing a DNF review of a Liane Moriarty book…but I am. I totally am.

Apples Never Fall is the newest release from this highly talented writer, who is usually one of my favorite authors. I will read anything she puts out. Generally, I’ve liked all of her books, and I’ve absolutely loved some of them (see below).

As with most Moriarty novels, Apples Never Fall contains family drama and secrets, with someone possibly concealing a murder. I was invested in the entire Delaney family from the beginning, and I was intrigued by the premise of the novel – their beloved mother and wife has disappeared without a trace, and her husband may be to blame.

However, about 100 pages in, my enthusiasm for everyone and everything started to wane. There’s a lot of family tension in Apples Never Fall , particularly between the four siblings. I’m an only child, so maybe I just don’t get all the petty one-upsmanship and bickering that goes on between brothers and sisters, but…there’s a lot of it in this book. It got annoying.

There’s also clearly some kind of con going on between the parents and a stray waif they randomly take in. Said waif may or may not have something to do with the mom/wife’s disappearance. (Note: this is not a spoiler; the siblings are all thinking this from the get-go.) I quickly formed my own theories about what was going on with this sitch and continued reading, eager for when the truth would come out.

After about 200 pages of wondering where the heck the mother/wife is and whether or not the father/husband actually killed her… I flipped to the back of the book to find out what happens.

When I read it, my first reaction wasn’t “OMG! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!”

It was “Do I really need to read 200 more pages to find this out?”

After a few minutes of waffling, I closed Apples Never Fall and placed it on my library return pile for the next day.

As I like to say, not everything can be a winner , especially when you’ve churned out as many hits as Moriarty. Similar to my feelings about my reader-relationship with Jane Green , and particularly after my so-so take on Nine Perfect Strangers , I can’t help wondering if I’ve just out-grown my proclivity for Moriarty’s books.

If you’re a Liane Moriarty fan, you should give Apples Never Fall a try. I know plenty of people who enjoyed this one, so you may, too. There’s nothing wrong with it; it just takes too long to get where it’s going, in my opinion.

If you’ve never read Liane Moriarty book, please do not let Apples Never Fall be your first foray into this author’s works. I don’t think it does her justice. If you’re looking for domestic suspense, I recommend Big Little Lies or The Husband’s Secret , and if you’re looking for women’s fiction, I can’t say enough good things about The Hypnotist’s Love Story , What Alice Forgot , and The Last Anniversary .

But I think I’ve said all I can about Apples Never Fall .

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2 thoughts on “ Book Review of APPLES NEVER FALL ”

Totally agree with you on everything you have written including the recommendations for other Lianne Moriarty novels.

Felt the same way as you with Nine Perfect Strangers too.

Hoping the same doesn’t happen with Jodi Picoult as have her most recent on my TBR pile!

Hi, Katie! I’ve never read Jodi Picoult (well, maybe one, a long time ago!), but I could imagine the same thing happening with her books! After awhile and after so many books, how can every single one be fantastic? I hope her newest lives up to your expectations, though!

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Spoiler Discussion and Plot Summary for Apples Never Fall

Have you read Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty and want to discuss the ending? Welcome to Jen Ryland Reviews! If you are looking for a spoiler discussion or plot summary for Apples Never Fall , then pull up a chair, grab yourself some apple crisp and let’s discuss!

Spoiler Discussion and Plot Summary for Apples Never Fall

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty. Published on September 14, 2021 by Henry Holt.This post contains affiliate links.

If you want a spoiler-free review of Apples Never Fall , I have that too!

Here’s a list of the topics this Spoiler Discussion and Plot Summary of Apples Never Fall will cover

Character list for apples never fall, plot summary for apples never fall.

Timeline for Apples Never Fall – this had a past/present timeline that was a bit confusing. I break that down here!

The Ending of Apples Never Fall: What Happens at the End?

Spoiler Discussion for Apples Never Fall

The delaney family.

Joy Delaney – wife of Stan, mother of four, former tennis player and co-owner of Delaney’s Tennis.

Stan Delaney – Joy’s husband and co-owner of the tennis academy.

Troy – Joy and Stan’s son

Brooke – Joy and Stan’s daughter. A physiotherapist who gets migraines.

Amy – Joy and Stan’s youngest child

Logan – Joy and Stan’s son

Savannah – mysterious visitor to Stan and Joy’s house

Barb – cleaning lady who finds Joy’s phone 

Claire – ex-wife of Troy

Grant – ex-husband of Brooke

Indira – ex-girlfriend of Logan

Christina  and Ethan – police officers investigating Joy’s disappearance

Simon – Amy’s flatmate

Henry Edgeworth – a plastic surgeon who is called by Joy before she disappears.

Caro – Joy and Stan’s neighbor

Hien – a friend of Logan

Timeline of Apples Never Fall

review book apples never fall

The narrative of Apples Never Fall has a present/past format which was a little confusing at times!

Events in the present take place in Sydney during mid-February/March 2020: Joy disappears on Valentine’s Day and her family reports her missing a week or so later. By the end of the book, COVID has taken hold of the world.

Julie (in comments) also points out something important: that Savannah locked her mother in her room back in 2019, BEFORE she came to Sydney and wreaked havoc on the Delaney family. At the end of the book, Savannah is returning to Adelaide, the key to the room hanging around her neck, to check on her.

Events in the past take place during the prior September/October 2019: I was confused about the references to Father’s Day but finally figured out that in Australia, where the book takes place, Father’s Day is observed on the first Sunday in September. A-ha!

Present: A man finds a vintage ladies’ bike and four apples at the side of the road. Four siblings gather in a cafe to discuss their missing mother.

She sent them a garbled text that she was “going off the grid” and they haven’t seen her since. They all order apple crumble, as they’ve been trying for years to reproduce their grandmother’s recipe.

sportive woman with bicycle resting on countryside road in sunlight

Savannah Shows Up at the Delaney House

Last Sept: Late one evening, Joy and Stan Delaney answer a knock on their door. It’s a young woman who is disheveled, bleeding, and barefoot. She says her name is Savannah and that she’s fled from an abusive boyfriend. They invite her in and insist she spend the night.

Present: The Delaney’s cleaning lady, Barb, asks about Joy. Stan says she’s “away.” Barb finds Joy’s phone under the bed.

Last Sept: Brooke reads about Harry Haddad, an Australian tennis star returning to the game after an injury. Her father Stan coached Harry as a child. Amy calls Brooke and mentions “the girl” living with their parents and says that she’s concerned.

Tennis stadium overhead shot - two people play as a crowd watches

Present: The siblings discuss whether to report their mother missing and the scratches on their father’s face.

Last Sept: Logan goes to his parents house and meets Savannah, who tells him about her abusive boyfriend.

Present: The police interview the family. Stan admits to having argued with Joy before she left. Logan tells the police that his father didn’t do anything. He mentions Savannah and suggests they look into her.

Last Sept: At their mother’s request, Troy and Logan are going with Savannah to get the things from her apartment. Brooke tells her mother that Harry is writing a memoir, which makes Joy nervous. She remembers how Harry’s father Elias used to wink at her. Troy is also worried about Harry’s autobiography as he once punched Harry.

Present : The police find questions about divorce in Joy’s internet search history and discover that her phone showed a long call with a plastic surgeon. The police talk to Amy, who defends her father. They tell Amy he got his car washed the day after Joy went missing. They ask her about the plastic surgeon.

Last September (Father’s Day): Both Amy and Savannah make brownies. Brooke doesn’t tell her family about her separation from her husband. Stan critiques all the kids’ tennis games. Logan says his girlfriend Indira left him. Troy says that Claire, his ex, wants to use their embryos to have a baby with her new husband. Joy isn’t feeling well and asks everyone to leave. She ends up in the hospital with a kidney infection.

review book apples never fall

Last October: Logan’s girlfriend Indira calls to ask how Joy is feeling. Indira says that Logan’s parents have a good relationship.

Logan retorts that several times during his childhood his father left for days. Logan then sees a woman on TV telling the exact same story that Savannah had told him about her abusive ex. Amy and her flatmate Simon go to Joy and Stan’s house but Savannah says they are sleeping and doesn’t want to let them in.

When Joy is feeling better, Savannah and Joy go shopping and people think they are mother and daughter. Stan has suggested that since Savannah has been around for six weeks she should look for her own flat. Savannah asks Joy if she or Stan ever cheated and Joy lies and says no.

Joy begins to become suspicious of Savannah.

Present: A neighbor recalls that she driving down the block shortly after Joy vanished and finding Stan lying a gutter. She drove him home and his four children were all there, but not Savannah or Joy.

Last October : Savannah shows up at Troy’s apartment. She tells him that when Joy was in the hospital, Stan hit on her. 

Who is Savannah, Really?

Present: Simon agrees to help Amy run a background check on Savannah. Logan decides to go talk to Savannah’s abusive ex, who insists he never hit Savannah.

He and Logan compare notes and discover that Savannah has told them completely different stories about her childhood. She was not in foster care. 

Her boyfriend says on her birthday he forgot to show up for her birthday dinner. She came home, they argued, she cut herself on a wineglass and just walked out. He says before she walked out she’d watched a news report on Harry Haddad.

open birthday greeting card near pen

Last October: Brooke does a reverse image search on Savannah and discovers she’s Savannah Smith, a ballet dancer from Adelaide. After looking at an old newspaper article featuring Savannah as a child,

Brooke remembers seeing Savannah at her house years before. Simon discovers that Savannah was accused of selling fraudulent tennis memorabilia.

Present: Brooke’s ex husband comes forward to say that Joy had an affair.

Past October: Savannah is out so Joy searches her room. Troy calls to say that he’d just paid off Savannah to keep her quiet about Stan harassing her.

Stan says Savannah flirted with him, which is why he told Joy she needed to leave. Stan and Joy find a photo album in Savannah’s room that includes a picture of her with Harry Haddad.

He had announced his comeback on her birthday, which was why she ran out on her boyfriend and ended up at Joy and Stan’s.

A Body is Discovered

Present: A body is discovered.

Past October: Stan calls a family meeting with Savannah, who claims that her parents split and her father took Harry while she lived with her mother, who starved her so she could do ballet. She tried to steal Brooke’s banana. Amy wouldn’t make her a sandwich.

Savannah says that her parents split because Joy told their father to take Harry to Melbourne for training. Savannah leaves the house.

Present: Troy tells the police that Savannah returned the money, and that two hippies came to collect Savannah’s stuff from their parent’s house.

The body discovered is Polly Perkins, a woman who told Joy decades ago that her husband wouldn’t let her buy a new iron and then left him to go and live in New Zealand. Actually her husband murdered her. The police also find Joy’s bloody t-shirt. The police ask Stan to repeat his story of the day Joy disappeared. 

review book apples never fall

Valentine’s Day (the day Joy disappeared:) After Savannah’s revelation about Joy sending Harry to a new coach, Stan and Joy aren’t speaking. Joy wants to go out but Stan took her car.

Joy buys four apples and sees that her bike tire is flat. Stan returns with an advance copy of Harry’s memoir. In the book, Harry admits to cheating at tennis, but only because his father told him Savannah had cancer. Stan and Joy argue.

The Police Start to Suspect Stan

Present: The police find CCTV footage of Stan taking an unwieldy object to his car. They finally reach the plastic surgeon who says that he didn’t talk to Joy. It was his friend Savannah. Simon finds a clue in Joy’s text. 

Valentine’s Day: Savannah calls Joy and apologizes. She was angry at Joy for splitting up her family, which led to Savannah being abused by her mother.

Savannah confesses to trying to sleep with Stan, filing a complaint about Logan at his job. She emphatically tells Joy that she is NOT A NICE PERSON.

Savannah says is going away for two weeks and wonders if Joy wants to come. Joy writes a note to Stan apologizing for sending Harry away, but saying she and the kids needed Stan more.

Savannah and Joy go off the grid and participate in a “live off the grid” charity challenge hosted by Harry.

Ending of Apples Never Fall Explained

What happened at the end of Apples Never Fall?

First off, Joy wasn’t dead. She went off with Savannah for two weeks.

Joy did leave a note for Stan, but it fell off the fridge (the defective fridge magnet was mentioned earlier as a clue) and the dog ate it (the paper-eating dog was also mentioned earlier.)

Joy’s garbled text to her children was caused by autocorrect.

person holding phone while logging in on instagram application

The unwieldy object Stan was taking to his car was some old carpet. The mysterious call to the plastic surgeon was actually a call between Savannah (who had suddenly become the girlfriend of the surgeon) and Joy.

What Happens to Each Character at the End?

review book apples never fall

JOY – feels bad for almost getting Stan arrested. She and Stan start playing tennis together again.

TROY – gives Claire permission to use their embryos. Claire and her new husband move to Australia and she is pregnant. Joy thinks Claire and Troy might get back together.

BROOKE – gets an apple crumble from Savannah, who has finally figured out the family recipe.

LOGAN – decides his friend Hien’s son is a tennis prodigy. Logan is going to coach him.

SAVANNAH – flies to Adelaide to visit her mother.

Before she had come to Sydney to infiltrate the Delaney family, she had confronted her mother about abusing her as a child.

After her mother took her nightly sleeping pills, Savannah dragged her to the bedroom and locked her in with some bottled water and protein bars.

It’s suggested that, when she was a child, Savannah’s mother used to lock her in that same room. Her mother might or might not have escaped from of the room or survive.

review book apples never fall

On the plane, Savannah toys with the key necklace around her neck and tells her seat mate that her mother plays tennis.

What did you think? For me, this was an odd book.

I went in expecting a domestic thriller about Joy’s murder and got more of a family saga about marriage, parenthood, relationships, and the grudges people hold about perceived wrongs that our family members have done to us.

The plotting was clever – all the (misleading) clues were very skillfully planted, from the faulty fridge magnet to the paper eating dog to the phone call to the plastic surgeon.

My theory about the book was completely wrong. I thought, based on the title, that Savannah was Joy’s child, possibly fathered by Elios Haddad. There were red herrings about both Joy and Savannah being physically small, about them being mistaken for mother and daughter, and also about Joy’s infidelity.

What Are Your Questions About Apples Never Fall?

What did you think was going on in the book? I was convinced about my theory of Savannah being Joy’s s ecret baby.

What do you think is point of the book ? That some people get over their childhoods and other people don’t? That marriage and family relationships are complicated?

Why does Savannah say that her mother plays tennis? (Run, Joy, run!!!!!)

Did you find the ending satisfying?

How do you feel this fits into the fictional world of Liane Moriarty? Some people in comments feel that Apples Never Fall is more true to her older books. I see it as sort of a hybrid. There’s clearly a crime element (as Savannah may or may not have killed her mother) but by the end I felt like this was more of a family saga than a mystery.

Thanks for reading my Spoiler Discussion and Plot Summary for Apples Never Fall!

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I didn’t like this book. I felt it went on and on and on. The ending was confusing. Did her mother die in the room? Also, I just don’t get the title. If Stan had killed Joy, it would have made sense. Who was the apple?

Hello, Nancy! Thanks so much for joining the discussion. I am a fan of Moriarty, but feel that her books have taken an odd turn, first with Nine Perfect Strangers and now this. I guess we’re supposed to go into this assuming that Stan did it and then, surprise, Joy is just fine.

It’s unclear to me if Savannnah’s mother dies or not, but if she doesn’t get herself out of the room, it seems like she would. Do you think this is fitting revenge for Savannah’s mother mistreatment of her or just proof of the book’s title, which I interpreted as based on the old saying that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” meaning that children often end up similar to their parents. The book centers around family relationships so that’s just my take.

Why did Savannah tell her seatmate on the plane that her mother plays tennis?

Hi, Linda! I returned my book so can’t look and give an opinion. Hopefully someone will have a thought!

I think this comment suggests she will be going back to the family to finish off what she started.

Ha – we think alike.

I think it’s because she has made peace with her past and now believes she is better off returning as Joy’s companion/friend/daughter type person.

I agree to that

Savannah considers Joy to be her mother. My question is, does that mean she’s going to interfere in Joy’s life again? Yikes!

Yes, I agree. Savannah has moved on to a new family.

I think this is exactly right, IMO! Joy is now Savannah’s “mother”. I don’t think her biological mother actually played tennis at all, from what I remember, which may have been a detail about Savannah’s mother mentioned early in the book. this is a tricky (good) ending, and makes the book. I got a pleasant chill up my spine on this last sentence. Very good! Bravo!

I also wondered why Savannah said that her mother played tennis. I question whether this very-last-sentence-of-the-book is actually true, and if Moriarty meant for that to be a full/stop jaw dropper — something for the reader to puzzle over and figure out. Or was it just another instance of Savannah borrowing someone else’s story?

It seems that Moriarty’s subject matter has gotten a little darker and heavier since Big Little Lies (1&2, followed by Nine Perfect Strangers, and now Apples).

I agree with Maureen and Clara that Savannah has moved on to her new family and considers Joy her mom.

I am not a fan of this weird trend in books recently for there to be a strange little twist at the end. In The Sanatorium , it was a set-up for a sequel. In The Weekend Away , I am not sure what purpose it served except to shock. I did a post on Thrillers With Last Minute Plot Twists here and I’m not really a fan. I read mysteries and thrillers so chaos can be organized and order restored!

And yes, I agree that Moriarty’s books have shifted from lighter domestic thrillers to more offbeat stuff (In Nine Perfect Strangers and Apples.)

I agree. She is borrowing another identity.

Just before she told her seat mate that, she had been remembering some nice things Joy had done for her. I think she was wishing she’d had such a mother as Joy. She is a natural liar, and perhaps she is writing a new narrative for her life.

YES I am totally on board with this theory. She has left her biological mother to die and now regards Joy as her mother. Lucky Joy!

I read this as her representing Joy as her mother, as she’s the only maternal figure in her life.

The last chapter on Savannah gave us more perspective as to why she had the personality flaws she did- the psychological and physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother. I agree Savannah saw Joy as her ideal mom, and her abused psyche is creating a new narrative for her life. Question is, will she still be the “devoted daughter” and return to let her mom out of the room? Would evil mom even still be alive? How long was Savannah gone? She left her mom with 2 cases of nutrition bars and a palette of water. She was with the Irish painter for a few weeks, with the Delaney’s for a few weeks, with the plastic surgeon for a bit, then at the off grid charity thing with Joy for 3 weeks. Overall I loved the family dynamics, the messages of redemption and love even in the face of flaw and imperfections and regrets. I do think Moriarty went on a bit too much at the end and not sure the whole Covid thing was necessary or added anything to the story. I don’t think this book was any darker or more twisted than Big Little Lies. Rape? Physical abuse? Accidental revenge killing? Fun read.

Hi Amy! So glad you joined the discussion as you make a lot of excellent points (and I LOVE a timeline, which I did not make for Savannah – I might add yours into mine and credit you 🙂 ) I agree that I’m not sure Covid added anything. I have read three recent books in which I think Covid enhanced the storyline: 52 Days by Catherine Ryan, False Witness by Karin Slaughter, and Dark Hours by Michael Connelly. But I’m reading to escape the pandemic and I don’t really want to read about it. Too soon!

Finally, one of the things I like about Moriarty is that she’s willing to experiment. Nine Perfect Strangers got a little too weird for me. I felt a bit cheated by the marketing of Apples Never Fall. The marketing blurb made this sound like a domestic thriller, when really it was more of a family drama.

She was talking about Joy.

Hi there, from what I understood…Savannah, at that moment chose to still live a lie of being someone else. And in this fantasy, Joy is her mother.

*waves back* Thanks! I missed that tennis comment on the plane and am happy that everyone agrees that she has done away with her mother and considers Joy is her new one. Run, Joy, run!

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Apples Never Fall

52 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 14

Chapters 15-25

Chapters 26-35

Chapters 36-50

Chapters 51-71

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

Apples Never Fall (2021), by veteran Australian novelist Liane Moriarty, begins as a mystery thriller: Joy Delaney , a 60-something mother and retired tennis coach, suddenly vanishes on Valentine’s Day, and all signs point to her moody and volatile husband, Stan, himself a former world-renowned tennis coach, as the most likely killer. However, as the days pass and the police continue to search for Joy, the novel evolves into a probing psychological study of a profoundly dysfunctional family. Each of the couple’s four grown children harbors deep grudges and bitter resentments against the parents who dreamed of coaching their kids to be world-class tennis champions.

Moriarty’s ninth novel, Apples Never Fall features provocative and emotional scenes with a cinematic sensibility and a cast of vividly drawn characters in conflict with each other and their pasts. The novel quickly became an international best-seller, and even before its September publication, it was optioned by NBC Universal for a television mini-series.

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Chapter to chapter, the novel moves between events in the three weeks after Joy’s disappearance on Valentine’s Day and events in the months leading up to her disappearance. For convenience, this guide separates the two timelines.

Joy and Stan Delaney , married close to 50 years, are adjusting to retirement. For four decades, they ran one of Australia’s most respected tennis academies. Their four grown children—Troy, Logan, Amy, and Brooke—were all once promising rising tennis players but have now settled into lives far from sports, finding their own successes (and failures) and handling their own relationships, sometimes stormy, sometimes passionate.

The summer before Joy goes missing, while she and Stan are at home together, they answer a sudden knock at the door and are stunned to find a bloodied and bruised woman there. She identifies herself as Savannah Pagonis and begs for their help—her boyfriend beat her and she has nowhere else to go. For reasons she’s not entirely sure of, Joy takes in the terrified young woman and even offers her one of the children’s old bedrooms—to the chagrin and bewilderment of Stan and their children. The presence of the obviously troubled young woman and Joy’s maternal care for a total stranger spark wounding discussions among the siblings about their upbringing under their father’s authoritarian discipline: He dreamed of coaching them all to professional tennis glory only to see each of those dreams, in turn, collapse of its own irony: Troy was too flashy and volatile on the court; Brooke was crippled by migraines brought on by the stress of competition; Logan drifted, too noncommittal for any success; and Amy allowed too many uncertainties into her head.

Savannah quickly becomes a fixture at the Delaney home, doing all the cooking for the couple. During the Christmas holiday, tempers flare, and the family begins the difficult process of addressing decades-old emotional wounds. Logan checks into Savannah’s background and finds questionable details in her story about a supposedly abusive boyfriend, while Amy discovers that Savannah was briefly involved in an internet scam that involved selling fake tennis memorabilia. Concerned, Joy enters Savannah’s room while she’s out. She makes the startling discovery that Savannah is the sister of retired tennis star Harry Haddad, a protégé whom Stan developed years earlier until Haddad suddenly, inexplicably, left for another coach and subsequently won multiple Grand Slam titles. Under pressure from the family, Savannah confesses that she knew the Delaneys and that she was raised by an abusive mother who literally starved her, trying to mold her into a world-class ballet dancer. She says that she recalls coming to the Delaney house once, desperate for food, when her brother was training and that the family summarily turned her away. Savannah agrees to leave the house—but before she packs, she tells Stan that it was Joy who encouraged young Harry to leave Stan’s academy.

Stan can’t handle this revelation, and for weeks the couple alternates between bitter fights and long periods of silence. On Valentine’s Day, Joy—determined to make a peace offering to Stan—bakes him apple crumble pie, his favorite. Stan, however, blows up over what he now sees as Joy’s deliberate destruction of his coaching career. He walks out, and when he returns—he later tells police—Joy is gone. After several days, the family reports the missing mother, and the police immediately suspect Stan. The kids aren’t sure. As the investigation continues, Stan learns that Harry Haddad is returning to competitive tennis.

As the Delaney siblings struggle with the disappearance, they inevitably assess their lives: Brooke, separated from her husband, runs a homeopathic physiotherapy clinic that is floundering. Logan—whose longtime girlfriend, Indira, has left him, impatient with his indecisiveness—indifferently pursues teaching business communications at a community college. Troy, a ruthless but successful wildcat stock investor, struggles to work out details in a plan for his ex-wife to use embryos they froze when they were married. Amy, who works part-time as a taste tester, is haunted by various syndromes and neuroses.

After grainy footage from a neighbor’s security camera shows Stan struggling to put a roll of carpet in his car the night Joy went missing, the police believe they have sufficient cause to arrest him. While they’re at the house, however, Joy arrives. She quickly explains that she was emotionally confused and needed time away, so she impulsively agreed to go away with Savannah on a fancy 21-day off-the-grid retreat. She left a note, but Stan deduces that a faulty refrigerator magnet let the note slide to the floor and then the family dog ate it. Revived by her retreat, Joy is ready to make her marriage and retirement work. Stan explains to the police that he replaced a carpet that Joy long disliked to make up for quarrelling with her. The family reunites and pledges to work through their complicated and messy emotions together.

As the novel closes, Savannah boards a plane and heads back home to Adelaide. She reveals that before she left months earlier, she drugged her mother and left her locked in her bedroom with only a few protein bars and bottles of water, sure that her mother would slowly starve to death. Savannah is returning there to see whether her plan worked.

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Apples Never Fall Ending & Plot Summary Spoilers from the Book, Explained

Apples Never Fall

Apples Never Fall’s plot is full of secrets surrounding the Delaney family. Read on for a full breakdown of the novel, including its ending.

Apples Never Fall is a popular novel by Liane Moriarty, who is also known for writing Big Little Lies , among others.

The book was optioned for a limited series which will make its debut on Peacock in March, featuring an all-star cast that includes Annette Bening, Sam Neill, and Alison Brie.

What's Apples Never Fall Plot All About?

Apples Never Fall T series

Liane Moriarty’s 2021 novel Apples Never Fall focuses on the Delaneys, a family that, on the surface, appears to have everything figured out.

The parents, Joy and Stan, are retired tennis instructors and have four adult children: Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke. Things are pretty great for the Delaney family until it all begins to come crashing down around them.

The trouble starts when Joy disappears, and to further complicate matters, Stan is the primary suspect in the case. The four siblings promptly take it upon themselves to try and make sense of what happened and find their mother.

But before all that happened, a physically injured young woman named Savannah randomly shows up on Stan and Joy’s doorstep and pleads with the family to help her. They welcome this stranger into their home, but the girl begins to seem a little sketchy.

Upon investigating Savannah’s background, the kids discover that all is not right with her. She was previously associated with a scam and what’s more, her initial story, that her boyfriend beat her, had some holes in it.

To make matters all the worse, it’s revealed that Savannah is actually the sister of Harry Haddad, Stan’s former top tennis student. Harry left the tennis school some time prior and Savannah brings forth the revelation that it was Joy who counseled Harry to call it quits.

Stan and Joy have a huge fight, and that’s when Joy vanishes.

Spoilers Explained for Apples Never Fall's Ending

The readers’ response to the conclusion of Apples Never Fall was decidedly mixed, with many feeling that the book ended in an anticlimactic fashion.

At the end of the book, Joy reappears, alive and well. As it turned out, she was with Savannah on a little off-the-grid getaway. She had left a note explaining that she’d be away but it was unfortunately misplaced after she left. 

Stan is cleared of all charges and he and Joy begin to deal with the issues that have been plaguing their marriage.

Now, it remains to be seen how closely the upcoming Apples Never Fall Peacock miniseries, but perhaps the story could be altered a bit due to the somewhat divisive reaction to how the novel ended.

That question will need to wait until Thursday, March 14 to be answered, when all seven episodes of Apples Never Fall arrive on Peacock.

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Apples Never Fall

Recap & book summary.

The Quick Recap and Chapter-by-Chapter Summary for Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty are below. Spoiler warning: these summaries contains spoilers.

For a non-spoiler version of the plot synopsis, see The Bibliofile's review of Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty .

Quick(-ish) Recap

The one-paragraph version: Joy Delany goes missing, and her husband Stan is the prime suspect. Joy and Stan used to run a tennis school but are now retired. As her kids try to find out what happened, they end up confronting their own issues and in their relationships with each other. Last September, a young woman named Savannah showed up asking for help stayed with Stan and Joy for a while. It turns out that Savannah is the sibling of Harry Haddad, a former star student who is now a famous tennis player. She drops a bombshell that Joy is the reason that Harry left their tennis school. That revelation causes Joy and Stan to confront the issues in their marriage. In the end, Stan is almost arrested, but then it turns out Joy is alive when she returns from a 3-week off-the-grid trip with Savannah. She needed some time apart before returning to work on their marriage. The book ends with Savannah going home to confront her own mother.

The book opens with the discovery of a bike near the side of the road and four apples next to it. It then jumps to present day, the four Delaney siblings -- Brooke (29), Troy (early 30s), Logan (37), Amy (39) -- discussing the disappearance of their mother, Joy Delaney , who appears to have ridden off on her bike a week ago. She sent them a text message full of gibberish and hasn't been reachable since. They're worried that if they go to the police, the main suspect will be their father, Stan , since Joy and Stan had a fight before the disappearance.

Joy and Stan are retirees that used to run a tennis school. Stan did the coaching while Joy ran the busines. In their younger years, they played competitively until Stan was injured. All their kids also played and excelled at tennis, however, none of them made it to the top of the sport for various reasons. Amy got too "in her head" about it, Logan never "truly committed" to the sport, Troy was too show-off-y and not strategic enough, and Brooke got migraines that ended her career.

As the book jumps back and forth in time, it's revealed that last September, a young woman named Savannah Pagonis showed up at Stan and Joy's door, saying that she ended up here randomly since she didn't know where to go after getting into a fight with her boyfriend who hit her. Stan and Joy let her stay the night, and they eventually invite her to stay until she's sorted out. They tell Troy and Logan accompany her to her old apartment to pick up her stuff, where they have a brief but non-violent run-in with her ex-boyfriend, Dave . As Savannah stays with them, Joy is delighted that Savannah cooks for them, a task Joy has always hated.

Meanwhile, on the news, there are reports of a comeback for tennis star Harry Haddad. Harry is a former star student of Stan's, and the subject is a sore spot for Stan because Harry ditched him as a coach before he got really famous. Stan thinks he could've gotten Harry even further if he'd remained his coach.

In present day, the siblings end up going to the police and Detective Christina Khoury and Constable Ethan Lim start to investigate. As they gather evidence, they see the scratches on Stan's face and that Joy made a lengthy phone call to another man, a Dr. Henry Edgeworth , the day she left. They haven't been able to contact Henry yet. The siblings also try to track down Savannah, who is nowhere to be found. They also find Joy's phone underneath the bed in their parents' room.

Flashing back to September, the book also follows each of the siblings' lives as this is going on. Brooke runs a physiotherapy clinic and is currently separated from her husband Grant . Despite her migraines, she has always been the most resilient and responsible sibling. Logan teaches at a community college. His girlfriend Indira has recently left him after saying he was too passive and didn't want her enough. Troy is wealthy and works as a trader. He has always been competitive, especially with Logan (who in turn has never cared to compete). Troy's ex-wife Claire has recently asked if she could use their frozen embryos to have a child since she is having difficulty conceiving. He and Claire split because he cheated on her. And Amy is working part-time as a "taste-tester". She has mental ailments which she struggles with and is seeing a therapist ( Roger ) for.

On (Australian) Father's Day (in September), there's a family gathering where Savannah cooks for everyone. Stan and Joy almost get into a fight about how Stan has always seen anything having to do with taking care of the kids as solely her responsibility. However, Logan changes the topic to his breakup with Indira. The family is sad because they all loved her.

Soon, Joy is hospitalized for two days due to a kidney infection. In the interim, the siblings start to suspect that Savannah is a liar when Logan realizes her story about her abusive boyfriend is copied word-for-word from an interview in a documentary. Stan also wants Savannah to leave (which later turns out to be because Savannah tried to come on to him). Soon, Logan finds Dave (Savannah's ex), who says that he never hit Savannah. Dave says he accidentally forgot her birthday, and she walked out when a TV segment about Harry Haddad came on. Meanwhile, Brooke learns that Savannah's last name is fake. Amy learns (with help from a guy named Simon she starts seeing) that Savannah owned a company that was shut down because it sold fraudulent tennis memorabilia. Savannah also finds Troy demands money, saying that Stan was inappropriate with her and that she's going to tell Joy about it unless he pays up. Troy gives her the money.

In present day, Brooke works on finding Stan a lawyer. Meanwhile, the police learn about how Stan has a frustrating habit of leaving, sometimes for days, when he gets angry about stuff. Stan refuses to get a cell phone and doesn't tell anyone where he goes. The kids think that Joy might be gone as "payback" for all those times. As the police investigate, a body is found, but it turns out not to be Joy.

Flashing back to October, with everyone's suspicions about Savannah growing, Joy decides to investigate, too. A search of Savannah's room shows that Savannah has an eating disorder and, more shockingly, that she knows Harry Haddad. At that moment, Savannah admits that she's Harry sister who they met once. The family soon gathers, and Savannah explains to all of them that her parents are divorced. She stayed with her mother and their father took Harry. As a young girl, her mother wanted her to be a ballerina, so she forced Savannah to diet aggressively. One day, she came to the Delaney's house to pick up Harry. She was desperate for some food, but everyone was mean to her and yelled at her. So, she came back to exact her revenge.

While some of the Delaneys are sympathetic (Savannah agrees to return the money she got from Troy), they still tell her she needs to leave. Before she does, Savannah drops the bombshell that Joy is the reason that Harry Haddad ditched Stan as his coach. It turns out that Joy suggested to Harry's dad ( Elias ) that Harry leave because she didn't want Stan to be traveling internationally all the time and leaving her along to raise the kids and run their business. (Joy tells them it was also so he could focus on coaching their kids, but later she admits to herself that it was more for herself and because she was angry at Stan for walking out on her all the time).

Right after Stan learns this upsetting information, he walks out. However, he doesn't get far because he falls in a pothole and injures himself. Instead, he ends up stuck at home recovering. By Christmas, Stan and Joy parents are still not speaking to each other. When the family gathers, Joy burns some food and when Stan is rude about it, Joy destroys a decorative china cat that used to belong to Stan's mother. After that, the siblings stay away from their parents' house for a while.

In present day, more incriminating evidence is found. A bloody t-shirt belonging to Joy is found behind that Delaney house. And a CCTV recording shows Stan putting something bulky rolled up into his car trunk. (Around this time, Logan figures out that he really loves Indira, who has supported him through this ordeal, and, he knows he needed to truly commit to their relationship. He offers to move into a bigger place which she wanted, and he buys a ring to later propose with.)

Flashing back to this past Valentine's Day, Joy wants to give a peace offering to Stan by making some apple crumble pie (which Stan's mother used to make), but her bike gets a flat tire on the way back from the market and she abandons it and the apples by the street.

Instead, Stan and Joy get into a fight when Stan says he's just read Harry's memoir. It mentions that Harry had cheated at tennis as a kid. (Troy had said so in the past, but Stan never believed him and Joy accuses him of choosing Harry over their kids.) It escalates into an argument when Stan accuses Joy of sabotaging him. Joy, however, says that she gave up her profession, for him. She gave up tennis when he got injured and instead ran the business and raised their kids. However, Stan says that she was never good enough to get to the top, and Joy angrily says that he wasn't the best coach for Harry (which she doesn't actually believe). When Stan starts to walk out the door, Joy has finally had enough of him walking out and grabs at him to stop him.

(In that moment, Stan thinks about how his own father had once laid hands on his mother. He thinks about how angry he is and how he is just like his father. However, he also knows his father told him he should just walk away if he's ever in a similar situation, which is why Stan forces himself to walk out.)

In present day, the police show up to arrest Stan, but then Joy Delaney walks in the door, looking confused. She has been on a 21-day off-the-grid retreat with Savannah. Savannah had just so happened to call her after Stan walked out (she was staying with Dr. Henry Edgeworth -- someone else she was getting revenge on -- at the time which is why the police though Joy had chatted with him that day), and Joy had decided she didn't want to be there when he returned. Instead, she wanted to go away for a bit and then come back to work on their marriage. It turns out she had left a note on the fridge for Stan but it fell off and the dog must've eaten it. Her text to the kids also ended up full of typos and autocorrects which is why it was full of gibberish.

Stan soon lets the kids know that their mother is back and there are hugs all around. Stan promises to get a cell phone so he will not be unreachable anymore. He also removed the carpet from their living room (which is what the CCTV footage showed) while she was gone, since Joy has always wanted it gone. He later tells Joy that he "understands" about the Harry Haddad situation, and Joy admits to herself that she gave up tennis because she chose to.

Sometime later, Savannah goes home to Adelaide visit her own mother. She thinks of how her mother forced her to lose weight by locking her in her room as a child without food. When her mother takes her sleeping pills, Savannah drags her into her old room, puts some food and water in there, leaves a note telling her mother to ration it carefully and then locks her in there. She then flies off. The book ends with Savannah returning at a later time, not knowing if her mother is still in there or if she got out or if she's still alive.

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Chapter-by-Chapter Summary

The book opens on a Saturday morning. A car stops near an abandoned mint green bike with four green apples spilled over next to it. The driver gets out and puts the bike in his trunk. He plans on gifting it to his wife. However, 20 minutes later the man is killed in a head-on collision with a semi due to a difficult-to-see stop sign. The apples rot.

Chapter 1 (Now)

The Delaney siblings — Brooke (29), Troy (early 30s), Logan (37), Amy (39) — sit at a café discussing their mother Joy Delaney (née Becker) leaving a little over a week ago. She texted them before leaving, rode off on her new bike and disappeared. They’ve tried calling and texting their mother since then, but to no avail.

They haven’t reported it to the police yet, since they know the police will suspect their father, Stan , especially because Stan and Joy had argued before she left. They also wonder if they should contact someone named Savannah Pagonis .

Chapters 2 – 3 (Last September)

(From here on out, the book jumps back and forth from past to present.)

Flashback to last September. Joy Delaney, 69, is at home on a Tuesday night with her husband, Stan, and their dog Steffi . Currently, Joy is listening to a podcast about migraines since Brooke has suffered from them since childhood. She still feels bad that she had initially dismissed Brooke’s complaints as a child when they first started. Last night, Joy had attended the first session of a memoir-writing evening class she was attending to accompany her widowed neighbor, Caro .

Joy originally met Stan because they were both tennis champions. Later, the Delaney family ended up running a tennis school, Delaneys Tennis Academy , and tennis club. Now, the tennis school has been sold, and she and Stan are retired.

Joy now longs for grandchildren. Logan has been with his girlfriend Indira Mallick five years now, Brooke (who runs a physiotherapy practice called Delaney’s Physiotherapy ) is married to her husband Grant Willis , and the other two of her kids are single.

Joy’s thoughts are interrupted by a knocking on the door. Joy and Stan find a sobbing young woman in her late twenties there, who they don’t recognize. She says her name is Savannah. Savannah has a cut beneath her eyebrow. She says she got into an argument with her boyfriend who “sort of” hit her, so she ran out and into a cab. She’s new in town and doesn’t know anyone else in Sydney. So, asked him to randomly drop her off somewhere, and she came to their house because it “seemed the friendliest”.

After fixing up Savanah’s injury, they agree to let her stay for the night.

Chapter 4 (Now)

In present day, the siblings try to track down Savanah.

The last time they heard from their mother was on Valentine’s Day. She had texted them to say “Going OFF-GRID for a little while! I’m dancing daffodils 21 dog champagne to end Czechoslovakia! Spangle Moot! Love, Mum.” While their mother had indicated she was going “off-grid”, it was still odd for her to be out of touch for so long.

Chapter 5 (Last September)

Flashback to last September. After Joy and Stan set up Savannah in Amy’s room, Stan puts away their (meager) valuables in their room. Alone in their room, they talk about how awful it is that Savannah’s boyfriend hit her. As a boy, Stan had once seen his father knock his mother unconscious by throwing her across the room, and he now still refuses to talk about his father.

Later, Stan is on his iPad (which everyone is surprised he uses because he refuses to own a cell phone) when Joy spots the name “ Harry Haddad ” on a news item. Harry is their former star student, but he is a touchy subject for them.

Chapters 6 – 7 (Now)

In present day, Barb McMahon , the Delaney’s housekeeper and an old friend, cleans up around the house. Barb started working as a cleaner ten years ago, after her husband Darrin died of a stroke.

It has now been 8 days since Joy unexpectedly went away without mentioning it to Barb. As she cleans, Barb spots Joy’s cell phone under the bed. Barb wonders why Joy would leave without her cell phone. She goes into the kitchen where Troy and Stan are chatting and shows them what she found. Stan is expressionless (and later Barb remarks to people that she found his response “suspicious”).

After Brooke hears about the recovered cell phone, she asks her father how bad their argument was before her mother left.

Chapter 8 (Last September)

Flashback to last September. Brooke is on her way to work, still reeling from the brutal migraine she’d had that weekend. Her husband Grant had moved out six weeks ago. On the news, Brooke hears the news about Harry Haddad. The report says that Harry is planning to return to professional tennis after retiring four years ago due to a shoulder injury. He’s also going to release an autobiography.

Brooke thinks back to how her mother had handled the business of the tennis school and her father had done the coaching. Harry had been his star, but Harry had eventually dumped Stan as a coach. Harry had gone on to win three grand slams, but Stan believes he could have gotten him further. Stan had been blindsided and hurt by being discarded as a coach.

While Harry is now known as a high-profile philanthropist, Brooke mostly remembers how Harry had always been a cheat. He use it as a tactic to “rattle and enrage his opponents”.

Meanwhile, for Brooke’s clinic, things have been stressful since a redevelopment of the area had been causing all the businesses around there to lose customers. The stress over that and her separation from her husband was also contributing to her migraines. The renovations had finally just completed, but by now she’d been informed that this quarter would be “make or break” for her business, so she needed things to go well.

Brooke gets a call from Amy. Amy is the oldest, but she’s also a free spirit who has “no career, no driver’s license, no fixed address and precarious mental health”. On the phone, Amy mentions Grant, and Brooke lies and says that Grant is away camping.

Amy then tells Brooke about a random girl (Savannah) staying with their parents. Amy finds the situation very odd and feels weird about it. Amy reports that Savannah has been there a week now, and they’re “letting her stay there until she ‘finds her feet'”.

Chapters 9 – 10 (Now)

In present day, Amy talks on the phone to Logan about whether they should file a missing persons report. She talks about how their dad has scratches on his face (which their dad says he got climbing through a hedge) which the police may assume are “defensive wounds”. Their dad doesn’t think they need to report it, but Amy disagrees and is headed over to the police station to do it anyway.

The next day, Detective Senior Constable Christina Khoury goes over her notes as she heads over to question Stan along with Constable Ethan Lim . Christina is recently engaged to her fiancée, Nico , and her mind wanders to her bridesmaid dress fitting that’s planned for later that day.

To Ethan, she notes now the missing person, Joy, took no clothes with her and there was no activity on her bank account. Two hours later after talking to Stan, the Delaney house is now sealed and Christina has put in for a crime scene warrant. She is certain that Stan is a liar.

Chapter 11 (Last September)

Flashback to last September. Logan heads to his parents house. Logan has been doing odd jobs around the house ever since his father had suffered a torn ligament on his 70th birthday. Troy (who is well off a-nd drives fancy cars) had offered to pay for things like a gardener or cleaner to handle these things, but Logan was sure their father would find that demeaning.

As Logan attends to various things around the house, he thinks about how his girlfriend Indira had left him, saying that he was too “passive” and that he didn’t want her enough because he didn’t try to make her stay. However, Logan’s view was that Indira should do what she wanted, even if that meant leaving him.

At the house, an unfamiliar woman (Savannah) approaches him and introduces herself. Savannah tells him what his parents are up to and about how Joy had taken her to her hairdresser, Narelle Longford . As they chat, Logan mentions to her that he teaches at a community college.

Logan asks about her injury, and she explains that she and her boyfriend had seen a segment about domestic violence on television that had put her boyfriend into a bad mood. They’d gotten into an argument over nothing (she asked if he’d paid the car registration which he took as being passive aggressive) and things had spiraled.

Logan’s mother soon gets home. Joy asks about Indira, and Logan doesn’t mention anything about the breakup. Instead, he hands her a small gift that Indira had asked him to give to Joy weeks ago. Inside, there is fridge magnet of a yellow flower. Logan notices how his mother looks disappointed for a moment as she opens it. His mother then brightens up and explains that Indira knows she loves yellow gerberas and that they have a fridge magnet that keeps falling off.

When Joy mentions that they’re going to take Savannah to her apartment pick up her stuff while her boyfriend is at work, Logan finds himself getting roped into offering to accompany Savannah. Joy adds that Troy should go with them as well, just in case.

Chapter 12 (Now)

In present day, Logan is being questioned by the police in the lobby of the community college where he works. The previous days’ search of the Delaney house had yielded little. They ask Logan about his parents’ marriage, pointing out that his father never once tried to call Joy after the left.

Logan insists things were find between them, but he does tell them that his mother seemed to be feeling a little “down” prior to her disappearance. Beyond that, he also mentions that things got complicated for a while because of Savannah.

Chapter 13 (Last September)

Flashback to last September. As she cleans up around the house, Joy thinks about the gift and Indira and given her, but it reminds her of how disappointed she had been when she saw what it was. She had been hoping to find a picture of an ultrasound.

Still, Joy is in high spirits. With Savannah there, Joy and Stan are having more sex (possibly because “they were closing the bedroom door again, which used to be the signal for sex, or maybe Stan’s libido was helped by the sight of a pretty young girl flitting about the place?”).

Joy also thinks about how she hadn’t “fully understood how bored she and Stan had been until Savannah arrived on their doorstep”. Savannah also enjoys cooking, whereas Joy dislikes cooking, and has made dinner for them quite a few times.

Brooke calls Joy, upset about them having a stranger staying with them. Brooke also asks Joy about how her dad was reacting to Harry’s news and what Harry might write about Stan in his memoir. Joy tells herself the Delaney’s will just be one short chapter in the book. She tries not to think about things like what happened between her and Elias and whether Harry knew about it or not.

Chapters 14 – 15 (Now)

In present day, the disappearance is now being reported on by the news media, and journalists show up to pester Stan with questions. Police are trying to track down Savannah Pagonis.

Teresa Geer , a former friend of the Delaney family, reads the news about the disappearance and is reminded of their history. Her daughter, Claire , was Troy’s ex-wife, but they had split up five years ago. She considers telling Claire about the news, but decides against it.

(When they were married, Troy and Claire had lived in both the U.S. and Australia. However, after they split, Claire had met her current American husband through one of her American friends, so now Teresa blames Troy for Claire ending up in the U.S.)

Chapter 16 (Last September)

Flashback to last September. Troy, Logan and Savannah head over to her apartment to pick up her stuff. He thinks about how Savannah looked like someone who could be a drug user. He recalls his own “entrepreneurial” activities selling weed in high school and how he’d almost been caught. As they converse with Savannah, Troy tells her that he’s a trader (of financial instruments, commodities, etc.) for work. Savannah comments that he’s a risk-taker. Savannah in turn says that she does random jobs like working retail, etc.

Then, as Troy thinks about Harry Haddad’s upcoming memoir, he remembers how much he had disliked Harry. He once punched Harry in the face for cheating, and his mother had to convince Elias not to call the police.

Troy also thinks about his recent trip to New York. He’d met with Claire who had presented him with a difficult ethical dilemma that he was now trying not to think about.

When they get to Savannah’s apartment, they find themselves in a “hip harbourside neighborhood”, not a random place in the “boondocks” like Troy had imagined. However, Savannah stays in the car, reluctant to get out.

As they wait, Troy thinks about how he’d been the only one of the Delaney children to accept a tennis scholarship to attend a prestigious U.S. university, though they’d all gotten offers. He was so certain that his life choices were superior to his siblings’ and yet he desperately wanted to hear them verbally acknowledge it. It especially irritates him that Troy thinks he’s better than Logan specifically and has always wanted to compete with him, but Logan has no interest in participating in some type of competition with him.

Troy asks Logan if he still plays tennis. Logan says no, because when he starts to play he “starts to care if I win or lose” and that he can’t stand that. However, he still watches tennis on TV. Meanwhile, Troy says that he plays tennis socially, but he can’t stand to watch it. They both understand why this is for them and that tennis is “complicated” for all of them.

They finally check on Savannah, who starts crying. Troy comforts her, and she finally gets out of the car. As they go in, they can tell that that her boyfriend is an artist. They start moving her stuff out, but when they enter the bedroom, they see that her boyfriend is home. He initially thinks they are robbers and offers them money. When he sees Savannah, his demeanor remains calm, and he apologizes for what happened between them.

When the boyfriend tries to approach Savannah, Logan and Troy stop him, and the man looks scared. Troy finds himself thinking that he likes the feeling of being morally superior to this man and also eliciting fear from him.

Chapter 17 (Now)

In present day, Narelle Longford (Joy’s hair stylist) listens as the various clients gossip about Joy’s disappearance. They ask what Narelle knows, but she says little.

However, in her mind, Narelle knows that as someone who knows 30 years worth of Joy’s secrets, she’s certain she has all the information the police need to convict Stan. She tells herself that if Joy’s not back by her next appointment, then she’ll go to the police and tell them everything.

Chapter 18 (Last September)

Flashback to last September. Amy is in her room at the apartment she shares with her flatmates. She thinks about her mother’s memoir class and how she’d be happy to read it if her mother actually managed to write one. Amy’s parents both had “complicated” mothers. Her father in particular has never been able to talk about his childhood.

Amy then thinks about how Brooke started her own practice not too long ago, and she doesn’t understand why Brooke would do that. Growing up, Amy always felt weighed down by the constraints on their lives that their parents’ business created. Amy also thinks that the migraines made Brooke grow up too serious.

As for herself, Amy had decided that “full-time work was not for her”. It made her feel “claustrophobic”. Instead, she does a few shifts a weeks as a taste tester/”sensory evaluator”. She also does some product testing work as well. Amy has no savings and no furniture.

Amy’s therapists thought she had “ADHD or OCD, depression or anxiety or most likely both, a nervous disorder, a mood disorder, a personality disorder, maybe even a bipolar affective disorder”. Her current therapist, Roger , calls him self a “counsellor” and says he thinks “labels are a distraction”.

Amy is in bed when there’s a knock on her door from Simon Barrington , one of her many flatmates. Simon had recently been dumped by his girlfriend, and Amy knew he was heartbroken and drunk and that it was a bad idea to sleep with him. Still, she opens the door to let him in.

Chapter 19 (Now)

In present day, Detective Christina Khoury is at her desk, looking at a documents recovered from Joy’s computer. Joy has now been gone for 13 days.

The document is from Joy’s memoir-writing class. In it, Joy talks about her mother, Pearl . Joy’s father left them when she was 4, and then he died in a fist fight three years later. After Joy’s father left, they moved in with Pearl’s parents. While Joy grew up without her father, her grandparents loved her and provided her with stability. Joy’s grandfather loved tennis, and Joy came to love tennis as a child. Eventually, she met Stan who also played tennis competitively, but at 22 he suffered a bad Achilles injury. They ended up leaving the circuit and starting their tennis school.

The next document Christina looks at is a record of Joy’s search history, showing that she had been looking up questions about divorce. Ethan also tells Christina that right before Joy sent that final text message to her family, she had been on the phone for 40 minutes with a Dr. Henry Edgeworth , a 49-year-old plastic surgeon. Ethan also notes that there was a huge hailstorm two days after Joy left.

Chapter 20 (Father’s Day in Australia, First Sunday of September)

Flashback to Last September. On the first Sunday of September, it’s Father’s Day in Australia. As Savannah peppers Joy and Stan with questions about their marriage, Joy thinks about the “shameful”, angry moments. She also thinks they are happily married for the most part.

Joy also thinks about how her children “each fervently believed in separate versions of their childhoods that often didn’t match up with Joy’s memories, or each other’s”. They often misremembered things, but “held on tight to their versions” of their memories.

5avannah has told Joy that she grew up in the foster system, and Joy thinks she learned to be good at fitting in in various situations because of it. It occurs to her that Savannah might be cooking for them to ingratiate herself to them. Still, Joy is so happy to not have to cook anymore.

Today, Savannah is cooking lunch for Father’s Day since all the siblings will be around to celebrate. In the kitchen, Stan and Joy see that Savannah has made lovely chocolate brownies, which is what Amy usually brings. However, Amy’s are usually misshapen and too sweet for Joy’s tastes.

Joy and Savannah fret about upsetting Amy, but Stan brushes off their concerns. Joy thinks about how Stan has always fought against catering to Amy’s mental health issues, but in this case Joy has to weigh potentially upsetting Stan versus potentially upsetting Amy. Finally, she tells Savannah that the cookies will be fine.

Chapter 21 (Now)

In present day, Amy offers chocolate brownies to Christina and Ethan who have come to question her about Joy’s disappearance. Amy tells them that she thinks her mother is probably fine, but Christina counters by telling her about her father getting an expensive car detailing the day after her mother disappeared.

Christina also asks if she’s familiar with the name Dr. Henry Edgeworth, but Amy is not. They tell Amy about the phone call and that they’ve been unable to contact him since he appears to be out of the country at a conference. They also say that they’re still unable to track down Savannah. As they ask about Savannah, Amy starts by talking about how the two of them had both made chocolate brownies for father’s day last year.

Chapters 22 – 24 (Father’s Day in Australia, First Sunday of September)

Flashback to Last September, on Australian Father’s Day. Brooke is heading into her parent’s place when her mind turns to her troubled marriage. She plans to explain Grant’s absence by saying he was sick. She recalls how Grant had wanted to separate and his comments about her working too much. Meanwhile, at her clinic, she’d been dealing with cancellations and no-shows.

However, when she sees Logan and he asks about Grant, Brooke finds herself telling him the truth — that they’re having a trial separation. She asks him not to tell anyone else yet, and he agrees.

Logan then tells her about Indira. Brooke asks Logan about Indira — if she wanted a proposal or something else — but Logan just shrugs. Brooke thinks about how “his laid-back philosophy probably charmed his partners for the first five years and then one day they lost their minds”.

Soon, Troy pulls up outside as well in his fancy McLaren and Amy pulls up in an Uber with her brownies in tow.

Some time later, after lunch, the family sits around with plates containing two brownies each. Savannah has spent the while lunch serving everyone, ignoring their protests. Joy is in a good mood, thinking that Savannah’s presence has been a good distraction for Stan from the news about Harry Haddad.

Joy considers how both Indira and Grant are supposedly sick, and she thinks something is going on with Grant since Brooke is a terrible liar. The topic of the brownies also comes up, and Amy insists she’s not upset about them both making brownies.

The family soon starts reminiscing about the kids as children. However, when the topic of tennis comes up, the mood of the room seems to deflate. As Savannah presses the topic, Stan tells her that they were all in the top five of the junior players in the country at some point. Amy, however, clarifies that they each all never quite made it — “we all got close enough to make you think it was going to happen, and then one by one, we crashed and burned.”

Joy thinks back to her and Stan’s trip to Wimbledon. They’d always wanted to go. But are they were sitting there, the thought of themselves there as mere audience members (as opposed to as a coach, or player, or the parent of a player) reminded them of their spoiled dreams. Stan had started to feel sick and so they left even though they’d paid $6K each for the tickets.

Stan mentions how Amy was a “comeback queen” when she played. Joy thinks unhappily about how she suspected that Amy liked to lose points or games on purpose initially because she liked being the underdog. Eventually, at 14 or 15 she started choking (when your mental state prevents you from winning), and Joy thinks “that summed up Amy’s whole life: a constant power struggle with a cruel invisible foe.”

Stan then turns to Logan. He says Logan had a great forehand and stamina, but that “Logan never truly committed to the sport. He just didn’t want it enough.”

As for Troy, he had the desire to win, but Stan says Troy was a “show pony”. He wanted to go for “show-off shots” even when it wasn’t the best strategy to win the game. Troy brings up his tennis scholarship at Stanford, but Stan ignores it talks about how Troy also couldn’t control his temper. He brings up the Harry Haddad situation and how Troy lost his temper which got him banned for six months.

Troy says that Harry had cheated, but his father denies seeing it happened. Even now, Stan still “never saw how he betrayed Troy every time he made that statement”. (Brooke explains to Savannah that there’s no umpires at the lower levels so players make their own line calls.)

Finally, Stan turns to Brooke, who he describes as the smartest and most strategic one on court. He then says that her migraines are what caused her to retire from the sport. Stan then adds that with the “right medical advice things might have been different’, which causes Joy to get irritated since Stan had seen it as her responsibility to deal with the children’s medical care and “fix” Brooke.

Joy retorts that they tried so many doctors, but before things can escalate, Logan jumps in to tell them that Indira left him, just to change the subject.

With that, the whole family expresses their disappointment since they really loved Indira. Then, Brooke ends up telling everyone that she and Grant broke up as well. The family is sympathetic. Afterwards, Troy decides to make his own announcement.

Troy says that he met up with Claire, who is remarried now having difficulty conceiving with her husband. Claire still has their embryos from when they were doing IVF. (Their marriage broke up because he was unfaithful). She want to use them (and essentially have his children) and for her husband to adopt the child. Troy admits that he hates the idea, but the he knows it’s Claire’s only chance to have biological children.

Joy agrees that it’s the right thing to do, but it saddens her to think that her only grandchild might be one that she might never meet. Her mood only worsens as she realizes she’s been having weird symptoms lately and that it’s likely a UTI from her and Stan having more sex lately.

Joy suddenly starts arguing with Stan (about an old argument about him causing someone named Dennis Christos to have a heart attack). Then she turns to her children and asks what she did wrong that all of them are unable to “maintain a long-term relationship”. She pointedly asked if they are somehow “punishing” them for making them play tennis or something.

As they argue, Joy can tell that Stan is about to snap (“it had been twenty years since he’d done it but she still recognised the signs”), but Joy’s not in the mood for it and tells him not to “dare”. She then tells the kids to leave.

Chapter 25 (Now)

In present day, Joy’s been gone for 15 days. Brooke is talking to the police and tell them how Joy got sick last father’s day with a kidney infection (which she misdiagnosed as a UTI). Her mother was in hospital for two days. Brooke tells them they also had some family drama that day as well. She talks about how tennis dominated her childhood.

Brooke also says it was a bit odd that Savannah had been serving all of them that day and how enamored her parents were of her. Around the time her mother returned from the hospital, her brother learned something about Savannah that made them nervous.

Chapter 26 (Last October)

Flashback to Last October. Logan is at home thinking about how empty the apartment is without Indira. He tries calling a friend of his, Hien , but Hien is more interested in trying to convince Logan to coach his son in tennis.

Indira soon calls, asking after how Joy was doing in the hospital. As they talk, Logan ends up telling her about something his dad used to do that always bothered him. Logan says that if Stan got angry, he’d leave and disappear somewhere. They didn’t know where he’d go or for how long he’d be gone. Once he was gone for five days after Troy’s incident with Harry.

Indira comments about how his father was avoiding conflict and how she can’t believe Joy put up with that. However, when Indira starts to psychoanalyze him, Logan starts feels irritated. Logan says he would never stuff like that, but Indira says that he tends to “check out” during any type of disagreement. Before they can say more, Logan says that he needs to go, and they get off the phone. He tells himself that Indira was the one to leave.

Logan then gets a call from Don Travis , the head of his department. Don says that they’d gotten a complaint about him, implying some type of sexual harassment last week. Don says there was no official complaint and she didn’t provide a name, but Don wanted him to know about it.

To get his mind off things, he flips on the television. He stops on a channel airing a documentary where a woman is being interviewed. He recognizes the words she’s saying. The woman is talking about how her boyfriend flipped out after seeing a segment on domestic violence and being questioned about whether he paid the car registration fees. Logan recognizes it as the exact same story that Savannah had told him about her boyfriend, with parts that were copied word-for-word.

Chapter 27 (Now)

In present day, Christina explains to her boss that the family thinks that Joy has walked off as payback for all the times that Stan stalked off for days and was unreachable. Christina disagrees with them. It’s been 16 days now, and Christina is thinking that Joy is more likely dead.

Chapter 28 (Last October)

Flashback to Last October. After hearing the information about Savannah from Logan, Amy runs into Simon downstairs. He tells her that he has just quit his accounting job and is going to take a few months off to travel. Simon tells her that he’s trying to be more spontaneous because his ex-fiancé had said one of her issues with him was his lack of spontaneity.

Amy mentions that she’s headed to her parents’ place because she’s concerned they have a scammer staying with them, and he offers to give her a ride. Amy is determined to gather “biographical data” about Savannah. When they arrive, Savannah answers the door since both parents are asleep.

Savannah initially says it’s not a good time, but Simon says he needs to use the restroom. Amy and Simon then ask Savannah about her name, and she identifies herself as “Savannah Marie Pagonis”. Amy then goes to check on her mother, which wakes Joy.

They talk about Savannah, and Joy talks about what a great help Savannah has been. She also says that Savannah claims to have a “superior autobiographical memory” where she can recall her memories in great detail. Finally, Amy tells Joy about what Logan saw on television, with Savannah possibly having copied her story from someone on TV.

Chapter 29 (Now)

In present day, Simon’s older sister, Liz Barrington , asks him about what he knows about Joy’s disappearance as he does her taxes.

Chapter 30 (Last October)

Flashback to Last October. Joy and Savannah are having lunch after having gone on a shopping day. Joy thinks about how shopping with Joy reminds her of her own mother who liked doing stuff like this, unlike her daughters. Joy’s mother had died over 20 years ago, and her grief over it “had been so complicated and strange” since Joy’s mother hadn’t been a particularly good mother

As they chat, Joy asks about Savannah’s necklace with a key on it, and Savannah face looks hard for a moment. She says it was a gift from a friend to represent doors opening.

Joy thinks about how she likes the idea of Savannah staying on in their house as a lodger or something, with her maybe cooking in exchange for free rent, however Stan seems against it. Ever since she returned from the hospital, he’s been saying that Savannah has been here for six weeks now and perhaps it’s time for her to go.

Joy doesn’t believe the story Amy told about Savannah copying her words from some documentary. Still, she asks Savannah about the incident, though Savannah changes the topic. She asks if there was any infidelity in Joy and Stan’s marriage, and Joy lies and says no.

When they spot a girl in a tutu, Savannah comments that she used to do classical ballet. Joy find it odd that a foster parent would send her to do ballet. Joy asks about it, and Savannah says that it was just a few introductory lesson. Joy is certain Savannah is lying.

Afterwards, they run into Debbie Christos , the widow of Dennis Christos (who Joy previously accused Stan of having killed by causing his heart attack and who Joy had once kissed).

Chapters 31 – 32 (Now)

In present day, Debbie Christos gossips with her friend Sulin Ho about having met Savannah once as they discuss Joy’s disappearance. Sulin then comments that last October she’d seen Stan Delaney sitting in the gutter by the road and crying.

Debbie thinks about to how the Christos and the Delaneys were the four founding members of their tennis club. Debbie wonders if anything ever happed between Dennis and Joy, since both Dennis and Debbie had had “flings” early on in their marriage.

Sulin and Debbie are soon approached by Mark Higbee , who they both dislike and who also plays tennis on Monday nights socially. He obnoxiously and unsympathetically chats with them about Joy’s disappearance, saying that he saw Stan two days after Joy went missing and he looked terrible.

Elsewhere, Christina and Ethan discuss the case. They wonder if something happened between Stan and Savannah. Moreover, they discuss how the Delaney children all seem to be very “cagey” about something.

Chapters 33 – 34 (Last October)

Flashback to Last October. Troy contemplates what to do about the Claire situation, and he regrets cheating on her. He thinks about how meaningless the girl he cheated with was. After cheating, he’d confessed right as he came home, and he wonders why he has a tendency to self-sabotage. He thinks about how great Claire was and about how Claire’s new husband is a cardiologist from Texas who probably treats her well. Finally, Troy shoots Claire and email telling her to go ahead with using the embryos, agreeing to sign whatever documents were needed. He wonders if this was his “first ever act of unconditional love”.

Troy’s thoughts are interrupted by Savannah showing up at his apartment. She tells him that while Joy was in the hospital, Stan had made an inappropriate request, which she refused. Thinking of how upset Joy would be to learn about this, Troy insists that Savannah not tell her. When Joy says that she’s still “trying to decide”, he realizes that Savannah is “here to make a deal”, and he understands why she came to him (the one with money) as opposed to one of his other siblings.

Meanwhile, Logan is in class when it suddenly occurs to him to go talk to Savannah’s ex-boyfriend Dave to get more information about her. He heads over to the apartment that afternoon. Looking at the art on the walls, he’s reminded of how Indira had suggested they move into a larger place at one point so she could have a studio to paint. However, Logan had been reluctant to sell his home just in case things didn’t work out. Now that she was gone, he tells himself that “his strategy was sound”.

When Dave realizes who Logan is, he’s taken aback at first. But when Logan says that Savannah said he hit her, Dave seems genuinely surprised. Dave says that never happened. Instead, he’d been apologizing for forgetting her birthday that day they’d all shown up at his place. Dave says that Savannah has a tendency to lie about things.

Logan then mentions how his ex had wanted to start painting, but didn’t. Dave says she probably didn’t feel comfortable doing it around him, especially when she was starting off which is why she wanted her own studio.

As they chat, they establish that Savannah also lied about having recently moved from the Gold Coast and about having grown up in foster care. Finally, Dave tells him that what triggered Savannah finally walking out (saying she was “going back there”) was something totally random — a TV segment about a tennis player named Harry Haddad.

Chapter 35 (Now)

In present day, Brooke is on the phone with Troy at the offices of Marshall and Smith Criminal Defense Lawyers. She’s there to get her father a lawyer and meets with their senior partner Chris Marshall .

Chapter 36 (Last October)

Flashback to Last October. Brooke is trying to research Savannah online, but nothing comes up for “Savannah Pagonis”. Brooke then takes a photo of Savannah (which her mother had taken when they were shopping) and crops out her face. She uses reverse image search, and it leads her to an image of Savannah at the launch of a recipe book, referring to her as “ Savannah Smith “. Next, she finds a newspaper article about a young Savannah Smith winning first place at a regional ballet competition.

(P.S. Quick note — I know this is not how Reverse Image Searches work, but this is what happens in the book).

Later, Ines Lang , one of Brooke’s friends, soon shows up with a bottle of champagne after having heard about Brooke being separated from Grant. Ines tells Brooke how glad she is that Brooke’s no longer with Grant. She says it always seemed like Brooke was constantly making an effort to make him happy and not a two-way street.

Then, as Brooke recalls an old memory involving a girl stealing her banana as a child, she realizes that she’d met Savannah as a child.

Chapter 37 (Now)

In present day, Ines runs into Grant while she’s out shopping with her mother. Grant tells Ines that he and Brooke aren’t divorced yet, but they’re more focused on Joy’s disappearance right now. Grant also wonders why the police haven’t contacted him yet. He says he knows Joy once cheated on Stan, and he’s considering telling the police since it would create a motive for Stan to kill Joy.

Chapter 38 (Last October)

Flashback to Last October. Simon tells Amy that he did an ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission) search and it turns out that Savannah has a history of fraud. Three years ago, she was listed as the director of a business that was selling fraudulent tennis memorabilia.

Amy thinks about her father’s signed tennis ball collection and wonders if Savannah deliberately targeted her parents (i.e. her father may have purchased some fake signed tennis balls from her business, so Savannah knew he was a good target). Simon and Amy decide to go confront Savannah.

Chapter 39 (Now)

In present day, Ethan and Christina discuss Savannah’s aliases and her business selling fake tennis memorabilia.

Chapters 40 – 41 (Last October)

Flashback to Last October. With her suspicions growing, Joy goes into Savannah’s room when she’s gone. On the desk is a journal. Inside, she finds a food diary — a record of anything Savannah had eaten in immaculate detail. Joy realizes Savannah must have some type of eating disorder and feels bad for her.

Stan then comes looking for her. He tells her that Troy just told him he paid Savannah a bunch of money because she was claiming Stan had been inappropriate with her. Joy and Stan both know it must be a lie. Stan then says that while Joy was in the hospital, Savannah seemed to be subtly coming onto him little.

Stan thinks they should go to the police. As they discuss, they notice some photos in Savannah’s things. In one of them is a picture of a young Savannah with a young Harry Haddad. In that moment, Savannah walks in. She tells them that she is Harry Haddad’s sister, who they only met once as a kid.

Savannah thinks about how she’d started selling fake Harry Haddad memorabilia when he’d gotten famous, but his management team found out and put a stop to it.

Joy then recalls that Savannah’s parents divorced. Harry went with his dad, and Savannah grew up with her mother. Savannah tells them that tennis is what split her family apart, and her father and brother forgot about her. Her mother “loved her collection of bitter resentments more than her”.

The night she came to their door, it was her birthday. She’d left her boyfriend because he had forgotten about her, too (by standing her up). She gotten her injury on her eyebrow from tripping over a guitar case. She wasn’t sure exactly why she came back here — “it occurred to her that she should go back to where it started, as if she could travel back through time and stop Harry taking that first lesson, or if not that, at least make sense of it, or if not that, make that family pay for what they’d started”.

Chapters 42 – 43 (Now)

In present day, Caro Azinovic , one of the Delaney’s neighbors, is considering contacting police. She had told them that they were a nice and happy couple, but she remembered one night hearing the Delaneys arguing loudly and wonders if she should tell them.

Caro’s thoughts are interrupted by her son, Jacob, who tells her that “they’ve found a body”. Elsewhere, Sulin Ho slams on her brakes when she hears the news on the radio. They refer to Joy as a “poor missing grandma” on the news, and Sulin cries thinking of how Joy will never become a grandma if that really is her body.

Chapter 44 (Last October)

Flashback to Last October. Soon, the family is gathered at the Delaney house with Savannah there as well. Joy demands to know why exactly Savannah is doing all of this. Savannah starts recounting her memory of the one time she visited their house as a child.

She was there to pick up Harry, but she recalls being yelled at by Joy since she tried to go in through the wrong door. Then, the went through Brooke’s bag to take a banana, and Brooke yelled at her. Savannah says in her defense that she was starving because her mother wouldn’t let her eat, since she wanted her to be a ballerina. Savannah then says that Logan threw his racquet at her (it was the day he first lost against Troy and he lost his temper and tossed his racquet). And then she tried to go into the kitchen to get some food, but Troy chased her out. She also asked Amy to make her a sandwich, but Amy said no.

While Amy and Joy are sympathetic towards Savannah, Stan dismisses all of it and tells Savannah to leave. However, when he mentions Harry ditching him as a coach, Savannah drops a bombshell on them — that it was Joy’s decision for Harry to leave the Delaneys.

Chapter 45 (Now)

In present day, Christina and Ethan finally think they have a motive for Joy’s possible murder.

Chapter 46 (Last October)

Flashback to Last October. After hearing Savannah’s information, Stan instinctively knows it’s true, and he responds by walking out the door.

Back inside, Joy explains that she told Harry’s father that Harry needed training that Stan couldn’t provide, so they left. She ask Elias not to tell Stan about the conversation and he agreed.

She did it because if Stan was coaching Harry and traveling internationally all the time, then he would have never been able to coach his own kids. At that time, they still thought there was a possibility that these kids could get to the top of the sport. Beyond that, Joy says that she needed him because she was raising four kids and running a business.

Eventually they agree it’s time for Savannah to leave, and she agrees to pay back the money that Troy gave her. She apologizes before she leaves.

Chapters 47 – 48 (Now)

In present day, Christina has learned that the body they found wasn’t Joy’s. In fact, someone had spotted Joy yesterday getting off a train. Moreover, having finally learned more about the Savannah situation, Christina is annoyed that the Delaney siblings kept a lot of information from her in fear of making their father look bad.

As she talks to Troy, he confirms that Savannah return the money to him, though he says he didn’t cash the check because he feels bad for her. He says that both their fathers chose Harry Haddad over them.

He says that after the October encounter he never saw Savannah again. His father ended up returning soon after because he fell in a pothole and hurt himself. Someone drove him back. After that, he was stuck in the house for a while to recover and he was unable to play tennis during that time, so it was tough for him.

Troy then mentions an incident on Christmas that made him think that his parents might truly hate one another.

Afterwards, at the Delaney house, the Delaney siblings argue about what to do next. Troy admits to mentioning the Christmas incident to the police. Outside, Jacob Azinovic brings over a lamb casserole for them, though his real intention is to eavesdrop at his mother’s request. Jacob used to have a crush on Troy.

As the leaves, Jacob notices the security camera outside his mother’s house had gotten knocked astray by a hailstone a while ago and was now pointed partially toward the Delaney house. He wonders if it might have any relevant information.

Chapter 49 (Christmas Day)

Flashback to Christmas day. The Delaney family is gathered at their parents’ house. Amy is still seeing Simon, though he’s spending Christmas with his parents. The siblings talks about how they miss Indira, but not Grant. Amy thinks about how Brooke is more herself now that Grant is out of the picture. Their parents, however, are still not speaking to one another.

Then, a fire alarm goes off due to some smoke from a burning saucepan as Joy prepares lunch. Frustrated, she tosses the ruined food into the trash. When Stan comes in to ask when lunch is going to be ready, Joy takes one of the decorative china cat that used to belong to his mother (“they seemed to watch her, the way her mother-in-law had once watched her, with pure malice”) and lets it shatter on the floor.

Chapters 50 – 52 (Now)

In present day, Amy is in therapy with Roger Strout telling him about the incident at Christmas. She says that afterwards, they had an awkward lunch and that none of the siblings went to visit for a while. By the time they got the text from their mom, it had already been one week since anyone had heard from her. Amy stresses out about whether her father really did something to her mother or not.

Elsewhere, Christina has established that the body they found was Polly Perkins and that she’d been dead for 30 years. Her husband has confessed. He told everyone that Polly had left him and return home to New Zealand.

She soon gets word that a bloody t-shirt has been found behind the Delaney’s home. They soon bring in Stan for questioning. They ask him about Valentine’s Day. He says that they were sleeping in separate rooms at that point. They’d had an argument that morning, and he went out for a drive afterwards as a result. He returned at 10 o’clock later that night.

They confront him about the t-shirt, which he identifies as Joy’s shirt. He soon tells them he thinks he needs a lawyer.

Chapter 53 (Valentine’s Day)

Flashback to Valentine’s Day. By now, Harry’s comeback has been a huge failure with an embarrassing loss. As a result, Stan is on edge, reminded of Joy’s betrayal.

Joy is upset, too. She also decides to stop calling her kids and see how long it takes for one of them to call her instead. However, it’s now been a week and none of them have called. Tp her, it feels like her children don’t care about her.

Still, Joy thinks that she doesn’t want to give up on her marriage. She thinks about making apple crumble, his mother’s signature dish which he would understand as a peace offering. However, she checks and there’s no apples in the kitchen, and Stan has the car, so she has to take the bike to the grocery store. She manages to make it there and buy the apples, but then she ends up with a flat tire. Irritated, she walks home instead, leaving the bike and apples behind.

When she gets home, Stan tells her that Harry has published his memoir. In it, Harry admits to cheating at tennis as a kid. Joy reminds Stan that he accused Troy of lying about it, and Stan argues that Troy should be focused on his own game. Stan then says that the reason Harry played so hard was because Elias told him that his sister had cancer. He said that Harry had to win money so that his sister could get treatment.

It soon escalates into an argument about him taking Harry’s side over her kids and him accusing her of getting in the way of his profession. When he says that, she finally bursts out by saying that she gave up her tennis career for him. Instead, she spent her life taking care of their kids, running the business and cooking all the time which she hated.

However, he then says that if she really wanted to play tennis professionally, she would have done it. Joy is infuriated at how dismissive he is about her sacrifices. He also says that she was never going to make it into the top ten, otherwise he wouldn’t have let her stop playing tennis.

Angrily, she says that Stan wasn’t the best coach for Harry and that he was better off without him, though she doesn’t really believe it.

When he starts to walk out, she thinks about how it has always been unacceptable and wrong that he walks out all the time. She goes after him and reaches out to stop him, but it causes him to nearly fall and she accidentally scratches him. He grabs at Joy and she sees the blind rage in his eyes.

Chapter 54 (Now)

In present day, Christina and Ethan watch the CCTV video that Jacob had brought to them. In it, Stan comes out just after midnight and struggles with something large wrapped in a blanket which he carries into the trunk of his car.

Chapter 55 (Valentine’s Day)

Flashback to Valentine’s Day. Stan thinks back to his mother and how cruel she could be with her words. She berated his father until one day, his father lashed out and hit her. He remembers thinking that “she deserved it.”

He has always known he was like his father, and he thinks about how “his pain and hurt, ballooned within his chest” as he turned on his wife.

Chapters 56 – 62 (Now)

In present day, Troy tells Claire that they’re likely going to arrest his father based on something the police saw on the CCTV footage from across the street. Brooke is standing by her father even if he did do it (“one moment of madness doesn’t nullify a lifetime of love”), but Troy disagrees and isn’t speaking to Brooke.

Claire then tells Troy that she’s pregnant. Claire knows that neither Troy or her husband Geoff wants her to have Troy’s children, and she knows Troy is doing it out of guilt while Geoff is doing it out of love for her.

Elsewhere, Logan updates Indira on the situation with his mother. She tells herself she’s here to be supportive of him as a friend, but her friends insist she’s still in love with him. As they talk, Logan tells her he’s considering moving into a bigger house so she could have a studio to paint in (if they got back together). He’s also purchased a ring to eventually propose with.

Meanwhile, Simon thinks he knows what really happened to Joy. Amy and Simon “broke up” a few days ago, and Amy is preoccupied with her mother’s disappearance. Still, he goes to her room and shows her what he found and she gasps.

As Ethan and Christina go to arrest Stan, they get a call from a Dr. Henry Edgeworth, finally returning their call. He says that he doesn’t know a Joy Delaney and that perhaps they have the wrong person. Christina suggests that maybe someone else made the call from his house.

He then says that Savannah was staying with him (who claimed that her name was Savannah Delaney) a few weeks ago, but he hasn’t seen her since Valentine’s Day. Ethan and Christina wonder what it means that Joy and Savannah talked just before her disappearance. They decide they’re going to arrest both Stan and Savannah.

Caro watches as the police head in to arrest Stan. She’s on the phone with Petra, her daughter who lives in Denmark. As Caro tells her what’s going on, Petra sounds panicked, saying that she actually saw Joy on Valentine’s day.

Then, as the police arrest Stan, Joy Delaney walks in.

Chapter 63 (Valentine’s Day)

Flashback to Valentine’s Day. Despite his pain and humiliation, Stan knew he was not his father and didn’t want to “hurt a woman, not any woman, but especially not this woman”. He turns away and walks out.

Chapter 64 (Now)

In present day, Joy is confused, saying that Stan knew exactly where she was because she left a note on the fridge. They piece together that it must’ve fallen off because she used the fridge magnet that always falls off and perhaps the got chewed it up. Joy mentions her text message, but he says it sounded like gibberish.

As for the CCTV, it turns out Stan was getting rid of the carpet which Joy had wanted him to remove for years, so now they had wooden flooring. The t-shirt was left over from when she cut her foot at the beach one day. Joy says that Caro’s cat must’ve gone through their trash and left it nearby.

Stan also tells Joy that he finally bought a mobile phone, and he promises he’ll answer if she calls.

Chapter 65 (Valentine’s Day)

Flashback to Valentine’s Day. After Stan walks out, Joy feels listless and decides she doesn’t want to be home when Stan gets back. Suddenly, her phone rings and it’s Savannah. Savannah says she’s staying the secondary apartment of a married man who’s a plastic surgeon that she’s having an affair with.

Savannah starts to talk about Harry’s memoir and about how her father had lied to Harry. By the time Harry realizes that Savannah wasn’t really sick, Harry’s tennis career was already taking off. Now, she feels bad that she hated Harry so she didn’t do anything when his niece ended up getting sick.

Savannah says that she has signed up for an event for one of Harry’s charities to atone a little bit because she feels bad for hating him for so long. It’s a “21-Day Off-Grid Challenge to End Childhood Cancer”. As they talk, Joy suggests that she accompany her.

Before she leaves, she writes Stan a note apologizing for some of the things she said and for sending Harry away. Still, she defends choosing their children over him and says that she knows she was good enough to have played tennis as a career. She also writes that it has been hard for her with him walking out and disappearing, so she’s going to leave for a while and when they get back they can try to work things out.

She also texts her kids before she leaves and puts her phone on the nightstand, but it knocks to the ground as the leaves. Around that time, Petra is visiting Caro and is heading into the city, so she offers Joy a ride. They chat about Petra’s life. Right afterwards, Petra gets word that her son has broken his arm, so she flies home to Denmark the next day.

Chapters 66 – 68 (Now)

In present day, Amy sees what Simon found about Harry’s charity and their 21-Day event. Looking at her mother’s text, she realized it was supposed to read “Going OFF-GRID for a little while. I’m doing Harry’s 21-Day Challenge to End Childhood Cancer. Sponsor Me! Love, Mum.”

Then, she tells Simon she loves him and they kiss.

Soon, Stan texts the kids to say their mother is home. The family is reunited. In late January, the worldwide pandemic has just begun, with people social distancing and on lockdown. Troy and Brooke make up. Claire ends up moving back to Australia with her husband, and Troy decides he wants to share custody, which Claire’s husband reluctantly agrees to. Joy suspects that Troy wants to win Claire back.

In retrospect, Joy knows she gave up tennis by her own choice and that no one could have changed her mind. Still, she knows if she had a granddaughter who played tennis, she wouldn’t let her give it up for a boy.

While Stan and Joy don’t discuss the Harry Haddad situation, Stan does tell Joy that he understand why she did it, which Joy takes as forgiveness. Joy admits to herself that she sent Harry away more for herself that for her kids. She was angry with Stan for walking out on her all the time and tired of being responsible for everything. Later, Joy suggests to Stan that perhaps they could take turns with cooking during lockdown and Stan agrees.

Meanwhile, the kids ask what she did with Savannah while they were off-grid. Joy had a perfectly good time with Savannah, though she lies and tell the kids that they annoyed each other sometimes in the tiny house. While her kids are horrified by the idea of her forgiving Savannah, Joy thinks that forgiveness “comes easier with ago”.

While they were together, Savannah did admit that she was the one to call in the sexual harassment complaint against Logan. She was made brownies on Father’s Day to get back at Amy on purpose. She also admits to hitting on Stan when Joy was in the hospital. Still, Joy still thinks there’s something Savannah wanted to say but didn’t. Afterwards, Savannah says she’s finally going to call her brother.

Chapters 69 – 71 (Now)

Brooke is now single and still running her clinic as the pandemic rages on. She smells something familiar and sees that someone has left an apple crumble on her desk. Brooke thinks back to how Savannah and Joy had been trying to figure out Stan’s mother’s apple crumble recipe, and she knows that Savannah finally cracked it.

Soon, Logan calls Stan saying that he finally watched his friend Hien’s son play tennis. Logan says he’s great and that he’s going to try to coach the boy.

Stan thinks about his own father and how they used to play tennis together once a week secretly (since his mother didn’t know they met up). Stan’s father had hoped to someday see Stan play and Wimbledon, but he died when Stan was 16. Still, he recalls his father telling him (sometime after the violent incident with Stan’s mother), that if he (Stan) loses his temper with a woman or child someday, to just walk away. The day Stan and Joy had finally gone to Wimbledon, his complicated memories of his father had come flooding back.

Later, Savannah flies back to Adelaide to see her mother. She confronts her about the how she forced her to count her calories, how she locked her into her room to force her not to eat and how it led to her having an eating disorder. But her mother doesn’t apologize, saying she had a TV in her room and the trophies spoke for themselves.

Savannah thinks about how her mother had taken her to see Dr. Henry Edgeworth as a kid to potentially get plastic surgery on her ears (though it was too expensive so they didn’t do it). He’d laughed at her when she said she was hungry. Recently, she’d gotten her revenge on him, too.

When her mother falls asleep on her sleeping pills, Savannah drags her into her old room. She places a bunch of water and protein bars inside and leaves a note, instructing her mother to ration carefully. She locks the door, and then she leaves for Sydney for a while.

(In the interim, she reaches out to Harry, who agrees that they should meet up when the pandemic is over, since he lives in America.)

When she finally flies back, Savannah doesn’t know what she’ll find at home. Did her mother manage to get out or is she still locked in there? As she chats with her seatmate, Savannah tells him that her mother plays tennis.

(The book ends without knowing what happened to her mother. It also indicates that Savannah will continue lying to people and pretending to be someone she’s not, etc.)

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In Apples Never Fall , The Delaney family love one another dearly—it’s just that sometimes they want to murder each other . . .

If your mother was missing, would you tell the police? Even if the most obvious suspect was your father? This is the dilemma facing the four grown Delaney siblings.

The Delaney family is a communal foundation. Stan and Joy are the envy of all of their friends. They’re killer on the tennis court, and off it their chemistry is palpable. But after fifty years of marriage, they’ve finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. So why are they so miserable?

The four Delaney children—Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke—were tennis stars in their own right, yet as their father will tell you, none of them had what it took to go all the way. But that’s okay, now that they’re all successful grown-ups. Well, that depends on how you define success. No one in the family can really tell you what Troy does, but based on his fancy car and expensive apartment, he seems to do it very well, even if he blew up his perfect marriage. Logan is happy with his routine as a community college professor, but his family finds it easier to communicate with his lovely girlfriend than him. Amy, the eldest, can’t seem to hold down a job or even a lease, but leave it to Brooke, the baby of the family, to be the rock-steady one who is married with a new solo physiotherapy practice . . . which will take off any day now.

One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy’s door. She says she chose their house because it looked the friendliest. And since Savannah is bleeding after a fight with her boyfriend, the Delaneys are more than happy to give her the small kindness she sorely needs. If only that was all she wanted.

Later, everyone will wonder what exactly went on in that household after Savannah entered their lives that night. Because now Joy is missing, no one knows where Savannah is, and the Delaneys are reexamining their parents’ marriage and their shared family history with fresh, frightened eyes.

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My husband left me for her ex but came Back With Help of Robinsonbuc ler {gmail} com, 100% Guaranteed………………………

I found the book to be compelling at first. But, the four Delaney siblings gave accounts of situations and issues that seemed nearly identical to me. I found the book to have become tedious so I returned it to the library unfinished. So many books, etc.

Still not sure why she said her mother played tennis??? Was it because of her connection with Joy??

She (Savannah) said her mother played tennis – which was a lie. Just showing that she will never change.

Apples Never Fall Showrunner Explains How Faithful the Series Is to Liane Moriarty's Book

Melanie Marnich discusses the changes made to Liane Moriarty's book Apples Never Fall for the new show with Annette Bening, Sam Neill and Alison Brie.

  • Annette Bening, Sam Neill, Alison Brie, Jake Lacy, and more star in the adaptation of Liane Moriarty's novel, Apples Never Fall , where secrets unravel when the matriarch goes missing.
  • Showrunner Melanie Marnich discusses changing the setting to South Florida and condensing the story into a compressed, propulsive format over seven episodes.
  • The ensemble show focuses on each Delaney family member's history, secrets, and lies, with the final episode raising questions about Joy's disappearance.

The next adaptation of a book by Liane Moriarty ( Big Little Lies ) will hit Peacock on March 14. Apples Never Fall tells the story of the Delaney family, and the secrets brought to the surface when the family matriarch goes missing. 2024 Oscar-nominated actress Annette Bening leads the cast, which includes Sam Neill, Alison Brie, and Jake Lacy. In this TV adaptation of Moriarty's 2021 book, the Delaney's appear to have the perfect marriage, but there are secrets hiding beneath the surface.

Joy (Bening) and Stan Delaney (Neill) are recently retired tennis coaches and parents to four adult children. They've just sold their tennis academy, and all seems set for them to enter comfortably into their golden years. Then Joy suddenly vanishes without a trace. The Delaney children are forced to confront the truth of their parents' supposed perfect marriage as their father becomes the prime suspect in his wife's disappearance.

The task of adapting the #1 New York Times Bestseller for television falls on the shoulders of Melanie Marnich, Showrunner and Executive Producer, alongside EP David Heyman, the producer behind the Harry Potter film series. At the recent TCA Winter Tour, Marnich was joined by Bening, Brie, and Lacy to discuss the upcoming series and the trials and tribulations of bringing the Delaney secrets to Peacock.

"Liane’s book is amazing," praises Marnich. "It’s so rich and some of the most important things that [I took from that] are the themes, obviously the story, the emotional reality and story of these kids, the family, and the mystery of Joy Delaney. We had to make some changes to make it work for television obviously. It’s so rich with story, so now we have seven." She continued:

"The big change we made was relocating the story from Australia to South Florida, West Palm Beach, which is the seat of so much professional tennis training. That was a really fun change. We changed some of the characters, some of their intentions, some of the relationships, but really stayed pretty true to her beautiful book."

Related: Best Miniseries Based on Books You Should Watch Next

Apples Never Fall Will Span an Odd 7 Episodes

Apples Never Fall

Apples Never Fall

Long gone are the days of most television spanning an average 22 episode season, with most series choosing to keep the story tighter, prioritizing quality over quantity. However, the usual is still an even numbered set of episodes, with six, eight, or 10 being the norm. Apples Never Fall will be the odd man out with the limited series taking place over seven episodes.

"I originally conceived it, just in the early, early stages of kicking around between myself and David Heyman, I thought it would be eight" explained Marnich. "I thought it would be a good, solid, even number, but as I worked the material, and as I worked the story, and as I worked the mystery, I never wanted air to enter the show. I wanted to be compressed, super propulsive, full, deep, [...] like, have everything just daisy-chaining into each other. You know, everything connected with [...] sort of no air going out of it, is the best way I can say it. And I found when I took the idea of eight and put it into seven, there was some sort of motor and muscle that kicked in that felt really good."

For Apples Never Fall, it seems the structure of simply having seven episodes worked around the narrative Marnich wanted to tell:

In terms of it being an ensemble show [...] each episode kind of front burners a character to let us go deeper into that person's history, mystery, their secrets, their lies. It worked out numerically since the first episode is the Delaneys, and then after that is each one of the individual Delaneys, and so it just really made sense from a narrative structure as well.

Which leaves one to wonder, is the final episode Joy's, or will it be told from the point of view of the person behind her disappearance? Apples Never Fall will drop all seven episodes on Peacock on March 14. You can watch it then through the link below:

Watch Apples Never Fall

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Full Trailer for Mystery Series 'Apples Never Fall' with Annette Bening

by Alex Billington February 14, 2024 Source: YouTube

Apples Never Fall Trailer

"Nobody can break your heart like your own children." Peacock has debuted the official trailer for mystery thriller series called Apples Never Fall , arriving to watch streaming in March. Another new crime thriller series to watch along with so many others nowadays. It's adapted from the book of the same name by Liane Moriarty. The lives of retired tennis coaches are upended upon the disappearance of the wife. The Delaney family seems happy, but everything changes when a wounded young woman knocks on their door. When Joy suddenly disappears, her children are forced to re-examine their parents' so-called perfect marriage as their family’s darkest secrets begin to surface. The mysterious series stars Annette Bening as Joy Delaney, Sam Neill as Stan Delaney, Alison Brie as Amy Delaney, Jake Lacy as Troy Delaney, Georgia Flood , Conor Merrigan Turner , Essie Randles , Jeanine Serralles , & Dylan Thuraisingham . Obviously this looks like it has plenty of twists and turns, and it seems that maybe the children aren't so innocent in this family.

Here's the main official trailer (+ poster) for Peacock's series Apples Never Fall , direct from YouTube :

Apples Never Fall Series Poster

You can watch the teaser trailer for Peacock's Apples Never Fall series right here for the first look again.

Based on Liane Moriarty's NY Times bestselling novel , Apples Never Fall centers on the seemingly picture-perfect Delaney family. Former tennis coaches Stan (Sam Neill) and Joy (Annette Bening) have sold their successful tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. While they look forward to spending time with their four adult children (Jake Lacy, Alison Brie, Conor Merrigan-Turner, Essie Randles), everything changes when a wounded young woman knocks on Joy and Stan's door, bringing the excitement they've been missing. But when Joy suddenly disappears, her children are forced to re-examine their parents' so-called perfect marriage as their family's darkest secrets begin to surface. Apples Never Fall is a mini-series created and adapted by Melanie Marnich. Adapted from the book of the same name written by Liane Moriarty. Written by Lijah Barasz, Joe Hortua, Kimi Lee, and Gianna Sobol. Featuring episodes directed by Chris Sweeney and Dawn Shadforth. Executive produced by Melanie Marnich, Liane Moriarty, David Heyman, Albert Page, Jillian Share, Gregory Jacobs, Annette Bening, Joe Hortua. Peacock releases the Apples Never Fall series streaming starting March 14th, 2024 coming soon.

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  1. Book Review: Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

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COMMENTS

  1. Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty review

    In Liane Moriarty's new novel, Apples Never Fall, a mystery unfolds in snippets and whispers - a suspected murder, a missing body - but every witness has their own story: exams to sit, bills...

  2. Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

    Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty | Goodreads Jump to ratings and reviews Want to read Kindle Unlimited $0.00 Rate this book Apples Never Fall Liane Moriarty 3.78 333,454 ratings26,613 reviews Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Best Mystery & Thriller (2021) #1 New York Times Bestseller A Peacock Original TV Series-Streaming Soon

  3. Liane Moriarty's New Novel Is a Family Saga and a Mystery

    By Liane Moriarty I couldn't quite square the title of Liane Moriarty's new novel, "Apples Never Fall," with the family story it unfurls. When we meet the Delaneys — petite, spunky Joy and...

  4. Summary and Review: Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

    Book review and synopsis for Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty, a family drama about four siblings, their missing mother and a stranger who shows up at their door. Synopsis Apples Never Fall follows the four Delaney siblings after the disappearance of their mother, Joy Delaney.

  5. Liane Moriarty's 'Apples Never Fall' book review

    Review by Bethanne Patrick September 16, 2021 at 10:28 a.m. EDT On the cover of " Apples Never Fall ," Australian novelist Liane Moriarty's ninth book, there are four gorgeous red fruits.

  6. APPLES NEVER FALL

    IndieBound Bestseller Australian novelist Moriarty combines domestic realism and noirish mystery in this story about the events surrounding a 69-year-old Sydney woman's disappearance. Joy and Stan Delaney met as champion tennis players more than 50 years ago and ran a well-regarded tennis academy until their recent retirement.

  7. Review: Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

    Review: Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty By Heather Caliendo Published: September 22, 2021 Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty is a unique mystery and family drama. Liane Moriarty is one of my favorite authors. Earlier this year, I ranked her best books and it was a lot of fun to take a look back at some of her previous novels.

  8. Review: Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

    Apples Never Fall by liane Moriarty review Apples Never Fall was so overhyped by the bookclub scene that I really didn't have this on my TBR list. Another Mom drama, right? About a neighborhood struggling with mundane issues that entertain, but you'll forget about when the next one comes along.

  9. Book Review: Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

    Review: Simmering, cunning, and cleverly intricate! Apples Never Fall is a compelling, character-driven, domestic thriller that takes you into the lives of the Delaney family as they each grapple with sibling rivalry, enduring jealousy, resentments, and long-buried secrets when their matriarch disappears one day leaving behind only a garbled text message and a husband who seems suspiciously ...

  10. Apples Never Fall

    Bestselling author Liane Moriarty returns with APPLES NEVER FALL, a scandalous, page-turning novel about the secrets that threaten to tear apart even the most solid unions --- marriage, parenthood, siblinghood --- and whether or not any of us can ever really remember the past perfectly.

  11. Summary and reviews of Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

    Summary and reviews of Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty | Reviews | More Information | More Books Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty Critics' Opinion: Readers' rating: Published Sep 2021 480 pages Genre: Thrillers Publication Information Rate this book Write a Review Buy This Book About this book Summary Book Summary

  12. Amazon.com: Apples Never Fall: 9781250220257: Moriarty, Liane: Books

    An older book first published in late summer of 2021, "Apples Never Fall" is an Amazon Editors' Pick and spent weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List. As of this review date, her overall Amazon rating is 4.2 out of 74,700 ratings with a combined 5-star and 4-star rating of 79%-quite good!

  13. Book Review: Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

    As mentioned earlier, I did go into this thinking it was going to be more of a thriller, which it was not at all. I'm not sure if this is a regular Liane Moriarty thing, or if Apples Never Fall just came off differently than expected. Nevertheless, I still really enjoyed the family drama/mystery and wasn't overly upset that it was less ...

  14. Amazon.com: Apples Never Fall: 9781250894229: Moriarty, Liane: Books

    An older book first published in late summer of 2021, "Apples Never Fall" is an Amazon Editors' Pick and spent weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List. As of this review date, her overall Amazon rating is 4.2 out of 74,700 ratings with a combined 5-star and 4-star rating of 79%-quite good!

  15. Book Review of APPLES NEVER FALL

    Book Review of APPLES NEVER FALL - A Well-Read Tart Book Review of APPLES NEVER FALL Posted on January 11, 2022 by CJ | A Well-Read Tart Ugh. I can't believe I'm writing a DNF review of a Liane Moriarty book…but I am. I totally am. Apples Never Fall is the newest release from this highly talented writer, who is usually one of my favorite authors.

  16. Spoiler Discussion and Plot Summary for Apples Never Fall

    Welcome to Jen Ryland Reviews! If you are looking for a spoiler discussion or plot summary for Apples Never Fall, then pull up a chair, grab yourself some apple crisp and let's discuss! Spoiler Discussion and Plot Summary for Apples Never Fall Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty.

  17. Book Marks reviews of Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

    Book Marks reviews of Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty Book Marks Apples Never Fall Liane Moriarty Buy Now Indiebound Publisher Henry Holt & Company Date September 14, 2021 Fiction Mystery, Crime, & Thriller If your mother was missing, would you tell the police?

  18. Apples Never Fall Summary and Study Guide

    Apples Never Fall (2021), by veteran Australian novelist Liane Moriarty, begins as a mystery thriller: Joy Delaney, a 60-something mother and retired tennis coach, suddenly vanishes on Valentine's Day, and all signs point to her moody and volatile husband, Stan, himself a former world-renowned tennis coach, as the most likely killer.

  19. Apples Never Fall Ending & Spoilers from the Book, Revealed

    Peacock Liane Moriarty's 2021 novel Apples Never Fall focuses on the Delaneys, a family that, on the surface, appears to have everything figured out. The parents, Joy and Stan, are retired tennis instructors and have four adult children: Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke.

  20. Apples Never Fall Sneak Peek by Liane Moriarty

    3.82. 892 ratings52 reviews. From #1 New York Times bestselling author Liane Moriarty comes a novel that looks at marriage, siblings, and how the people we love the most can hurt us the deepest in Apples Never Fall. The Delaney family love one another dearly—it's just that sometimes they want to murder each other . . .

  21. Apples Never Fall

    Book Details. From Liane Moriarty, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, comes Apples Never Fall, a novel that looks at marriage, siblings, and how the people we love the most can hurt us the deepest. The Delaney family love one another dearly — it's just that sometimes they want to murder ...

  22. Apples Never Fall: Recap & Chapter-by-Chapter Summary

    For a non-spoiler version of the plot synopsis, see The Bibliofile's review of Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty. Quick (-ish) Recap The one-paragraph version: Joy Delany goes missing, and her husband Stan is the prime suspect. Joy and Stan used to run a tennis school but are now retired.

  23. Amazon.com: Apples Never Fall eBook : Moriarty, Liane: Kindle Store

    Apples Never Fall. Kindle Edition. From Liane Moriarty, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, comes Apples Never Fall, a novel that looks at marriage, siblings, and how the people we love the most can hurt us the deepest. The Delaney family love one another dearly—it's just that sometimes ...

  24. Apples Never Fall Showrunner Explains Changes Made to Liane Moriarty's Book

    The next adaptation of a book by Liane Moriarty (Big Little Lies) will hit Peacock on March 14.Apples Never Fall tells the story of the Delaney family, and the secrets brought to the surface when ...

  25. 'Apples Never Fall' stars Annette Bening, Alison Brie, and Jake Lacy

    "Apples Never Fall" stars Annette Bening, Alison Brie, and Jake Lacy talk tennis training for their new Peacock series, which premieres March 14.

  26. Full Trailer for Mystery Series 'Apples Never Fall' with Annette Bening

    Apples Never Fall is a mini-series created and adapted by Melanie Marnich. Adapted from the book of the same name written by Liane Moriarty. Written by Lijah Barasz, Joe Hortua, Kimi Lee, and ...