What Alice Forgot: From the bestselling author of Big Little Lies, now an award winning TV series
As seen:
By Liane Moriarty
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1 review
From the bestselling author behind the addictive, award-winning HBO sensation BIG LITTLE LIES comes the compelling and thought-provoking story of love, life and memory
‘Gripping, thought-provoking and funny’ MARIE CLAIRE
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How can ten years of your life just disappear?
Alice is twenty-nine.
She adores sleep, chocolate, and her ramshackle new house.
She’s newly engaged to the wonderful Nick, and is pregnant with her first baby. But there’s just one problem.
That was ten years ago . . .
Alice slipped in her step-aerobics class, hit her head and lost a decade.
Now she’s a grown-up, bossy mother of three in the middle of a nasty divorce and her beloved sister Elisabeth isn’t speaking to her.
This is her life, but not as she knows it.
Just how many mistakes can you make in a decade?
Can she ever get back to the woman she used to be?
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‘Captivating’ Closer
‘Funny and knowing about what we choose to remember, and fight to forget’ O Magazine
‘A bittersweet tale by a gifted writer’ Woman’s Weekly
Praise for Liane Moriarty
‘Moriarty writes vividly, wittily and wickedly’ Sunday Express
‘Mistress of the razor-sharp observation’ Kate Morton
‘An extraordinary talent’ Nicole Kidman
‘Keeps you guessing to the very end – perfect summer read’ Reese Witherspoon
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Everyone who attended this months book club had completed the book! We felt that the book was quite realistic with people arguing and not getting along well, rather than it being filled with hearts and flowers.
We discussed whether we felt that divorce was catching, that when one of your close friends of family gets divorced you start to look at your own life and your current partner and wonder whether you made the right choice. Then when your divorced friends/family seem to be having more fun being single and dating you may again look at your partner and wonder if you could have done better. It does seem that this happened in this book, feelings of dissatisfaction occurred after Gina and her husband separated.
The fact that the time that Alice lost included time halfway through her pregnancy meant that she almost felt that she had suffered the loss of her baby. It was as if she mourned this lost child and she couldn't connect that pregnancy bump with the 10 year old daughter she had. It took her a long time to come to terms with the fact that she had three children none of whom she now knew at all.
It was interesting to see how everyone coped with the Gina issue as she seemed to have irritated everyone apart from Alice who she became weirdly close to over a very short period of time. It seemed that Gina became a sort of cuckoo, pushing out Alice's husband and her sister to take up all of Alice's time and energy. This created some issues when it came to what happened to Gina during the period of time that Alice has lost. We felt that there was a lot of wind-up to finding out what had happened to Gina, with Alice finding out lots of things and remembering bits of other things and also not letting on that she didn't have her complete memory back. However, when you actually find out what happened we felt it wasn't as interesting as we had suspected.
We enjoyed the underlying message that you can change your life at any point. If you find yourself getting a bit too manipulative as Alice did you can become more caring again. Maybe you wouldn't choose to have such a dramatic accident in order to change but it is possible. It also seemed that once Alice had changed those around her also changed becoming nicer towards Alice and each other.
It was interesting to find out about the different characters as we went through the book just as Alice was being reintroduced to them as well. A lot of the characters came across as really mean and nasty to start but once we discovered their history it became understandable, and they then changed into nicer characters as Alice had a positive effect on them.
The ending we felt was a bit of a cop-out, it felt that she had actually written two endings and rather than chose she had one ending, then wrote another one 10 years in the future that was completely different. We would have preferred that the author picked only one ending and stuck with it. The ending for the sisters was especially cliched and slightly irritating we found
Overall we gave this book 7 out of 10.
