Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty

Description

Nominated for the 2016 Holden-Crowther Book Award

Entertainment Weekly’s “Best Beach Bet”

A USA Today Hot Books for Summer Selection

A Miami Herald Summer Reads Pick

The new novel from Liane Moriarty, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Husband’s Secret, Big Little Lies, and What Alice Forgot, about how sometimes we don’t appreciate how extraordinary our ordinary lives are until it’s too late.

“What a wonderful writer―smart, wise, funny.” ―Anne Lamott

Six responsible adults. Three cute kids. One small dog. It’s just a normal weekend. What could possibly go wrong?

In Truly Madly Guilty, Liane Moriarty turns her unique, razor-sharp eye towards three seemingly happy families.

Sam and Clementine have a wonderful, albeit, busy life: they have two little girls, Sam has just started a new dream job, and Clementine, a cellist, is busy preparing for the audition of a lifetime. If there’s anything they can count on, it’s each other.

Clementine and Erika are each other’s oldest friends. A single look between them can convey an entire conversation. But theirs is a complicated relationship, so when Erika mentions a last minute invitation to a barbecue with her neighbors, Tiffany and Vid, Clementine and Sam don’t hesitate. Having Tiffany and Vid’s larger than life personalities there will be a welcome respite.

Two months later, it won’t stop raining, and Clementine and Sam can’t stop asking themselves the question: What if we hadn’t gone?

In Truly Madly Guilty, Liane Moriarty takes on the foundations of our lives: marriage, sex, parenthood, and friendship. She shows how guilt can expose the fault lines in the most seemingly strong relationships, how what we don’t say can be more powerful than what we do, and how sometimes it is the most innocent of moments that can do the greatest harm.

Editoral Review

An Amazon Best Book of August 2016: Many writers have trouble plumbing the depths of a single character’s soul. Moriarty effortlessly dives deep in six different characters—the three married couples at a backyard barbeque in Sydney that goes horribly wrong. Chapters jump in time between the day of the barbecue and its aftereffects in the present, with the ripples of that evening disrupting and destroying relationships. The exact nature of the shock isn’t revealed until midway through the novel, and I admit, I kept thinking to myself, “Given the buildup, this better be a wonderfully awful revelation.” Moriarty comes through, fitting the seemingly unrelated puzzle pieces together into a tight and harrowing picture. She even wraps up a long-ago tragedy that befell a crotchety neighbor in what is perhaps a too-neat moment that adds an unnecessary bow on top. While it would do the book a disservice to call it “light,” it’s so briskly paced that the pages flash by, aiming the reader, ultimately, toward a gleam of hope at the end. –Adrian Liang, The Amazon Book Review