7 January 2026
Having read Liane Moriarty's most recent novel 'Here One Moment' (reviewed here in January 2025) it was interesting to discover a much earlier book, 2009's 'What Alice Forgot', and to see that Liane Moriarty's entertaining style of suburban Australian domestic family life was already established then. The premise of 'What Alice Forgot' is that a head injury causes Alice to lose the last 10 years of her memory - waking to discover she is not 29 years old and expecting her first baby but 39 with three children. Her perfect recall of everything up to 10 years ago but nothing since does feel a bit contrived but allows for an enjoyable form of time travel. Encountering her own mother, transformed from how she remembers her, is like an alternative timeline scene from 'Back to the Future'. Liane Moriarty always reminds me of Anne Tyler but this feels like her most Tylerish novel. She constructs a great cast of slightly eccentric family and friends and it's fun for the reader to put the missing years back together with Alice. It's a funny, moving thought-experiment book.
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