It all begins on a flight from Hobart to Sydney. The flight will be smooth. It will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off the plane.
But almost all of them will be changed forever.
Because on this ordinary flight, something extraordinary happens. 'A lady', unremarkable until she isn't, predicts how and when many of the passengers are going to die. For some, death is far in the future; for others, it is very close.
A brilliantly constructed story that looks at free will and destiny, grief and love, and the endless struggle to maintain certainty and control in an uncertain world. Liane Moriarty is a modern-day Jane Austen who humorously skewers social mores while spinning a web of mystery and asking profound, universal questions.
If you've read and loved Liane Moriarty's previous books, you'll probably love this one too. She has a very distinctive voice and style that's pretty consistent throughout all her novels, in much the same way that Caroline Lee is a consistent narrator for Moriarty audiobooks. So, no surprises.
It's a slow burn of a novel and, at 500 pages there's certainly room for that. It took me a while to get into the groove with it, which I think has to do with the way characters are introduced: the 'Death Lady' is described for quite a long passage by everything she isn't, for example, and there's what feels like a cast of thousands of passengers that it takes a while to get to grips with. For me in the end, I kept having to think of them as 'the bride' or 'the overworked guy' and it was fortunate that the text isn't subtle with those reminders to help anchor readers amongst all those people.
Moriarty's books have one thing in common with thriller novels — conservation of characters and details. In thrillers, it means the inconsequential person or detail is going to turn out to be consequential after all, and that's the case with Here One Moment as well; if you think a throwaway line is just that, you're wrong, it will come back into play in the last third or quarter of the book, guarantee it. In one way, you can admire the craft; in another, it undermines the ability to get lost in the story — or at least it does for me — because you're always trying to weave the inconsequential into the web, caught in the craft instead of the story.
Or maybe that's just me, I don't know.
Overall, though, enjoyable and it picked up pace as it went on.
Started: 2 January 2025
Finished: 9 January 2025
Pages: 500
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