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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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clock This article was published more than 2 years ago
In Liane Moriarty’s ‘Apples Never Fall,’ a mother disappears and a family falls to pieces
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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Book Review 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. **face palm*
What’s Apples Never Fall about?
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 Moriarty’s 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. The Delaney family is full of sibling rivalry, a perhaps not-so-perfect marriage, and a lot of money that clearly doesn’t buy happiness.
And, tennis. A surprising amount of tennis.
Why I DNF’d Apples Never Fall
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 tension in Apples Never Fall 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.
Should you read Apples Never Fall ?
If you’re a Liane Moriarty fan, Apples Never Fall is probably worth reading. There’s nothing wrong with the story, per se; it just takes too long to get where it’s going. I know plenty of people who enjoyed this one, so you may, too. I mean, Peacock is making a movie/miniseries of Apples Never Fall. So, obviously, someone liked it.
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 great 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 .
Will I watch the series of Apples Never Fall ?
2024 update: I just found out a miniseries is being made of Apples Never Fall . After the success of Big Little Lies on HBO and Nine Perfect Strangers on Hulu, I guess I’m not surprised. But, I would have thought a different (read: better ) Moriarty book would have been adapted for screen.
That being said, I’ll probably watch an episode or two of Apples Never Fall when it comes on Peacock. I DNF’d reading Saint X , which was also made into a miniseries, and I ended up enjoying the show much more than the book. So maybe I’ll like the screen adaptation of Apples Never Fall better, too.
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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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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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BOOK REVIEW
by Liane Moriarty
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
CLOSE TO DEATH
by Anthony Horowitz ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2024
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
More by Anthony Horowitz
by Anthony Horowitz
YOU'D LOOK BETTER AS A GHOST
by Joanna Wallace ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2024
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer , 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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Review: Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty
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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‘Apples Never Fall’ Review: A Drama Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Formula
This Peacock mini-series about a bitter family and a missing woman is TV’s latest adaptation of a novel by the author of “Big Little Lies.”
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By Margaret Lyons
“Apples Never Fall,” premiering Thursday on Peacock, is the third Liane Moriarty book to be adapted for television, following HBO’s “Big Little Lies” and Hulu’s “Nine Perfect Strangers.” But if you told me it was the 10th, I’d believe you, given how familiar it all feels. The seven-episode mini-series is so well-oiled and unsurprising, it just glides on by.
Annette Bening and Sam Neill star as Joy and Stan Delaney, pillars of West Palm Beach, Fla., who are, as the central couples in these kinds of shows always are, seemingly perfect but secretly damaged. They’ve just sold their tennis academy and are balking at the alleged freedoms of retirement, which Joy thought she’d spend with her four adult children.
However, the kids don’t want to hang out with their hovering mom and volatile, bitter dad; they want to have their own lives of not-very-quiet desperation. Troy (Jake Lacy) is the clenched-jaw rich brother, at the tail end of a divorce from a woman everyone else really liked. Amy (Alison Brie) is the “searcher,” as her mother puts it, an aspiring life coach who would be perfectly at home on any show set in California. Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) wants to be beachy, not sporty, so he works at a marina and does yoga. Brooke (Essie Randles) is a high-strung physical therapist who is supposed to be planning her wedding but may be getting cold feet.
They probably would have kept on like that, except Joy has disappeared. And hmm, now that you mention it, there was that weird con artist, Savannah (Georgia Flood), who ingratiated herself into Joy and Stan’s life under very dubious circumstances. She couldn’t have something to do with it, could she? Well, we better bounce between two timelines to make sure: The days since Joy’s disappearance tick ahead in one timeline as we excavate all the mean family dinners from eight months ago in the other.
The show hits its steady simmer with tense competence and with some good lines. “I didn’t know how to fix it, so I broke it,” Troy says of his marriage, though it applies to all the siblings and their behaviors pretty equally.
All the best scenes are fights, and each character has a little trump card stashed away. As with hammers and nails, when you have a piece of incriminating intelligence about a relative, everything looks like an opportunity to deflect negative attention from yourself and hurt someone else. The children learned this kind of rage distribution and mistrust from Stan, whose rigidity and cruelty, particularly as a tennis coach, fell largely on Troy. Troy thinks his father knows more about his mother’s disappearance, and he’s frustrated — nay, enraged! — by his siblings’ reluctance to see their father as a brute.
And if “Apples” were just a domestic drama, that would probably be enough to sustain a story. But the show is also a missing-person mystery that is nowhere near as mysterious as it seems to think it is. When Savannah rings the Delaneys’ doorbell one night, claiming that she was fleeing her abusive boyfriend and had run right to this very street, a grift is so clearly afoot that the tension is less “hmm, what is really happening?” than “wait, how dumb are these people supposed to seem?” Every scheme is so telegraphed and unsubtle that it is hard to buy into the characters’ capacities to reason.
Mysteries often rely on characters being good liars, on viewers being fooled. To hide in plain sight requires hiding, though, and the show does not deploy any other techniques to cultivate complexity. If anything, it does the opposite: The police officers use their investigation primarily to announce each plot point. (“Well, now we know [a suspect’s] motive!”) There is no humor and little sense of place — the most distinguishing visual feature is the abundance of high ceilings. Even the tennis seems stripped of any psychological resonance.
“Apples” is not selling anything you couldn’t buy elsewhere; it’s a department store, not a fashion house. You can get the exact same scene of “a terrified family of a missing person visits a coroner’s office but finds the wrong body” on the smarter, more provocative “Expats.” You can get the “a storm in Florida also represents a storm [ sagely points at heart ] in here” on the dumber, high-on-its-own-supply “Extrapolations.”
Or perhaps you prefer something from the vintage collection, in which case you can capture the show’s general vibe by heading over to Hulu and recreating ABC’s Sunday night block from 2006-2010: “Desperate Housewives” followed by “Brothers & Sisters.”
That “Housewives” helped inspire the “Real Housewives” franchise, which demonstrated the modern appetite for rich women (some of whom commit crimes) drinking wine and yelling at each other. That formula got classed up by “Big Little Lies,” and, well, here we are again.
Margaret Lyons is a television critic at The Times, and writes the TV parts of the Watching newsletter . More about Margaret Lyons
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#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.
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
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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Word of Mouth
Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, 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. 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
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
Summary | Reviews | More Information | More Books
Apples Never Fall
by Liane Moriarty
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
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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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
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 ...
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- Breaking Down the Key Changes in <i>Apples Never Fall</i>‘s Leap From Page to Screen
Breaking Down the Key Changes in Apples Never Fall ‘s Leap From Page to Screen
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Apples Never Fall.
When it comes to producing a nail-biting thriller with emotional high stakes, you'd be hard-pressed to find material that's filled with more twists and turns than Liane Moriarty's books. Moriarty, the author behind the novels that inspired television shows like Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers , has a new adaptation to add to her body of work with Apples Never Fall , the new Peacock series that released in its entirety this week, based on her 2021 novel of the same name.
Read more: Breaking Down the Surprise Twist at the End of Peacock’s Apples Never Fall
Like the previous adaptations of her books, Apples Never Fall centers on complex female characters and the challenges that force them to make impossible decisions. Its deep themes on family and many intricate and interconnected storylines are what drew showrunner Melanie Marnich to pursue a television version—and also proved slightly challenging to adapt.
"It was just incredible—the book is just an embarrassment of riches and you just want to use it all," she told TIME. "It was really, really hard to figure out what served the momentum of the show and what served the mystery because you just loved it all."
Below, see how the series departs from its source material and how Marnich thought through those decisions in moving from page to screen.
The setting has changed
In Moriarty's novel, the Delaneys are Australian and live in Sydney. In the Peacock adaptation, Stan (Sam Neill) is an Australian tennis player who moved to Palm Beach, Florida, for his tennis career, which is where he met Joy (Annette Bening) and where they have resided, along with their children, throughout their 50 years of marriage.
The Delaney children's stories are different
In the book, some of the Delaney children's lives and occupations are different from those details in the show. In the novel, Amy is an aimless taste tester in her forties; in the show, Amy (Alison Brie) is in her thirties and an aspiring life coach. Troy is the Delaney's third child and a trader in the book, divorced from his ex-wife for years following his infidelity; in the show, Troy (Jake Lacy) is the oldest son and a venture capitalist whose divorce, also owing to infidelity, is more recent.
In the book, Logan is instead the oldest son. A teacher at the local community college, his girlfriend Indira breaks up with him because of his lack of ambition after years of dating. In the show, Logan (Conor Merrigan-Turner) is the third child and works at the local marina; while he's still dating Indira, she breaks up with him in the series because of his inability to prioritize her and commit to their relationship. While Brooke is the youngest Delaney child and runs a struggling physical therapy clinic in both the series and the book, in the TV adaptation, Brooke (Essie Randles) is engaged to a woman and has an affair with another key character, Savannah. In the book, she's just separated from her husband of nearly a decade.
Marnich believes that these changes helped the show speak to the current moment and also helped to center how each child had a different experience and view of their parents.
"What we really tried to tap into with the show was who they were at their heart and what would be the most active journey for television," she said.
Savannah's backstory is different
In the series, Savannah (Georgia Flood) is revealed to be a con artist whose name is actually Lindsay. She's also the little sister of Stan's former tennis protegée, Harry Haddad; she confesses that she wanted to disrupt the Delaney family's picture-perfect life because she blames them for her unhappy childhood with her abusive mother, which became worse after her brother and father moved out of their home when Stan stopped training Harry. In the book, Lindsay as Savannah has a more complex backstory; while their separated parents each took a child, Harry with their father and Lindsay with their mother, Lindsay was also pressured by her abusive mother to perform at a high level as a ballet dancer. Her mother tightly controlled her eating and access to food to the point that she was often starving, locked in her room with just water on a regular basis. At one point as a child, she came to the Delaney home to pick up her brother and attempted to steal food, but was shooed away instead.
For Marnich, the decision to leave out parts of Savannah's backstory was difficult, but necessary to keep the flow of the show focused on Joy and the Delaney family.
"It's so hard because one of the most delicious elements of the book is the backstory stuff," she says. "But when you're doing an adaptation, it has to live and breathe actively. The family was the here and now and we had to focus on them. If we had more of the point of view of Savannah, it might have shifted some of the energy in the show and shifted the storytelling. You have to be careful about stuff that takes you out of rapidly moving action."
The ending is softened—and doesn't include Savannah
In the show, Joy's disappearance is a decision made on a whim, accelerated by her family failing to appreciate her and by her explosive argument with Stan. She goes to Savannah's off-the-grid house in Georgia, without telling anyone where she's headed. She stays there until she hears about the hurricane in Florida and demands that Savannah drive her back home, which results in a car crash that Savannah flees. In the book, Joy instead leaves home for a remote health retreat with Savannah, leaving a note for Stan on the fridge about her whereabouts that falls off and is eaten by the family's dog. In both the book and the series, during this time, Joy confronts Savannah about lying about her identity and the interference in their lives; in the show, this results in Savannah causing a car accident, whereas in the book, they part amicably.
The biggest departure the series makes from the book is Savannah's involvement; in the finale, Savannah runs away from the site of the car accident before the police come to rescue Joy. She's not seen or heard from for the rest of the series. In the book, the final chapter focuses on Savannah, who's on a flight back home. It's revealed that months earlier, she had locked her mother in a room with just a pallet of bottled water and six boxes of protein bars, recreating the treatment her mother subjected her to as a child. Her return home is to see if her mother has survived. On the plane, she tells a fellow passenger that her mother plays tennis, pointing to how she came to look at Joy as a mother figure.
Of the shocking finale, Marnich says she wanted to preserve the thrilling twist and surprises that were present in the book.
"We wanted her time with Savannah to be part of the mystery and to be part of the jeopardy," she says. "Everybody thinks they know what could have happened. But for the audience to experience yet another twist was really important."
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Alison Brie and Jake Lacy Anchor Twisty Thriller Apples Never Fall
There's nothing subtle about the cold open that kicks off Apples Never Fall , Peacock's adaptation of Liane Moriarty's bestselling novel. As the chorus of "Unsecret" by Buried rings out, warning listeners of "secrets buried in the backyard," Joy Delaney (Annette Bening) rides her bicycle to the grocery store, where she grabs a bright, red apple and softly tosses it in the air like a tennis ball. Seconds later, Joy's bike lies in the middle of the street, blood dripping from the frame. Joy is nowhere to be seen, but her purchases — apparently, she filled her basket with a dozen loose apples and nothing else — are strewn about the road, forming a makeshift halo around the bloodied bike.
The scene effectively introduces the mystery at the center of Apples Never Fall — what happened to Joy Delaney? — but it's clumsy enough to plant a seed of doubt about showrunner Melanie Marnich's ability to translate Moriarty's book to the screen. Happily, though, this first impression isn't representative of the show as a whole. Like the seemingly picture-perfect Delaney family, there's more to this story than meets the eye: While its many twists are likely to keep viewers hooked for seven episodes, the drama's greatest strength lies its realistic depiction of familial dysfunction, particularly the complex, teasing dynamic between Joy's adult children, played by Alison Brie, Jake Lacy, Conor Merrigan-Turner, and Essie Randles.
The Delaney children each take on a distinct role that reflects their respective relationships with their parents, Joy and Stan (Sam Neill), who recently retired after a celebrated career as tennis coaches. The oldest of the bunch, Amy (Brie), is still looking for her purpose, but despite being mocked for her embrace of spirituality and alternative healing, she's the only one willing to wear her heart on her sleeve. Successful venture capitalist Troy (Lacy) has taken the opposite approach: After a lifetime spent fighting with Stan on and off the court, he prefers to keep his family at a distance, although he's made a habit of stepping in to help them financially when needed. Meanwhile, younger siblings Logan (Merrigan-Turner) and Brooke (Randles) have done everything possible to win Stan's affection; even as adults, they structure their lives around appeasing their father, sacrificing their own dreams so as not to disappoint him.
Even if the Delaneys aren't quite happy, they're sufficiently stable to project an outward image of harmony — until Joy suddenly disappears. The circumstances surrounding her disappearance are immediately suspicious. Beyond the abandoned bike introduced in the opening minute, Joy left her cell phone at home, and Stan, now with a deep cut across his cheek, has spent days lying to his children and curious neighbors about her absence. As the Delaney children begin looking into the case (and Jeanine Serralles and Dylan Thuraisingham's local detectives do the same) they uncover dark secrets about Joy and Stan's marriage that force them to reevaluate everything they knew about their relationship to each other and their parents.
As with Moriarty's previous work ( Big Little Lies , Nine Perfect Strangers ), those reveals come fast and furious until the limited series's final moments. It's difficult to discuss the season's trajectory without getting into spoilers, but the Delaneys' secrets, which range from the romantic to the professional variety, emerge naturally over time; they never feel forced or doled out with the intention of misleading viewers, as many streaming thrillers are wont to do. Past tensions, including the cause of the rift between Troy and Stan, also come full circle, creating a sense of cohesion across the show's multiple timelines.
Apples Never Fall 's unexpected turns make for compelling television on their own, but they're particularly powerful because Marnich and directors Chris Sweeney and Dawn Shadforth have such a firm grasp on these characters. With their differing skin tones and distinct features, Brie, Lacy, Merrigan-Turner, and Randles hardly look like siblings, but their constant needling and good-natured jabs instantly scan as genuine. Even when the playfulness fades and the siblings turn on each other, it comes from a place of deep familiarity — from decades of perceived slights and petty rivalries stoked by their hyper-competitive father.
Lacy and Brie, both playing somewhat to type as high-strung people looking for external validation (although Amy is more woo-woo than Brie's usual roles), are excellent in these emotional scenes, while Neill, as the gruff and uncompromising Stan, conveys the unique harm those closest to us are capable of causing. That becomes particularly apparent in his scenes with Bening (also an executive producer), who never mistakes Joy's kindness for weakness. Her resentment is palpable as Joy is iced out by her husband and children, so much so that when she invites an abused woman named Savannah (Georgia Flood) to stay with them, it plays as a believable, if ill-advised, attempt to fill the void with someone who actually appreciates her sacrifices.
Across seven episodes, the limited series alternates between the present-day search for Joy and Savannah's brief but memorable stint with the Delaneys seven months prior. But while the mysterious houseguest proves instrumental to the show's central mystery, Savannah, and Flood's stiff performance, are its weakest links. Details about her backstory and motivations are intentionally withheld until the finale, but up to that point, she's a blank slate; Savannah's only defining characteristic is her shiftiness and the general cloud of suspicion that follows her. Considering how much effort has been paid to developing the characters around her, Savannah's lack of depth proves disappointing, and her overall blandness blunts the impact of the story's final twist.
Apples Never Fall 's climax — and its last-minute return to the land of obtuseness — may leave some viewers dissatisfied, but the limited series is more about the journey than the destination. Anchored by rich performances from its ensemble cast, the efficient, handsomely made adaptation serves up family drama and high-stakes thrills in equal measure. That makes for a winning combination, no matter how much apple imagery Marnich jams into the cold open.
All seven episodes of Apples Never Fall premiere March 14 on Peacock. Join the discussion about the show in our forums .
Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg .
TOPICS: Apples Never Fall , Peacock , Alison Brie , Annette Bening , Conor Merrigan-Turner , Essie Randles , Georgia Flood , Jake Lacy , Liane Moriarty , Sam Neill
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- Peacock to adapt Liane Moriarty’s novel Apples Never Fall
TV & Movies
The Apples Never Fall Book Ends With An 11th Hour Twist
The new Peacock limited series adapts Liane Moriarty’s novel.
Nicole Kidman recently shared a promising update about Big Little Lies Season 3. But as fans wait to return to the moody, beautifully soundtracked world of Monterey, there’s yet another TV adaptation from the same author, Liane Moriarty, ready to stream. And, yes, twisty deceit abounds.
Peacock’s Apples Never Fall is based on Moriarty’s 2021 novel of the same name and revolves around the seemingly idyllic Delaney family: adult children Amy, Troy, Logan, and Brooke, and their parents, Joy and Stan, recently retired from running their own tennis academy. The events surrounding Joy’s sudden disappearance prompt the family to dig up drama that started in childhood and has lasting ramifications.
All seven episodes dropped on March 14, so you don’t need to wait week to week to find out how the Delaneys’ mystery unfolds. But just in case you want a peek ahead, here’s an Apples Never Fall book ending and plot summary breakdown.
A Mysterious Houseguest
The novel, which takes place in Australia (while the show is set in South Florida), shifts between two timelines: Joy’s sudden disappearance on Valentine’s Day — she texts her family she’s going “off-grid,” which they don’t buy — and the day, back in September, when a young woman named Savannah shows up at the Delaney home asking for help.
Savannah explains that she was hurt by her boyfriend and picked a random home for refuge. She then moves in indefinitely. While Joy loves her new houseguest (and her cooking), the rest of the family is disturbed that the stranger has suddenly become so involved in their lives in a matter of weeks.
At one point, Savannah even lies and tells Troy that Stan propositioned her, and secures money from him to ensure she won’t tell Joy. Other concerns also arise, like the fact that Savannah’s story about her boyfriend appears to be taken, word for word, from a news program.
Savannah’s Secret Identity
After catching Stan and Joy snooping for clues, Savannah reveals her real identity: She’s the sister of Harry Haddad, Stan’s former pupil who dropped him as a coach and later became famous. The siblings’ parents divorced, and while their dad was focused on making Harry a tennis star, their mom forced Savannah to pursue ballet and deprived her of food.
Savannah was envious of her brother’s treatment, and the Delaneys came to represent the life she wasn’t allowed to have. As a child, she says she once came to their house looking for food because she was starving. But they were unhelpful and unwelcoming. So getting involved in their lives and stealing Troy’s money is a means of payback.
One final bombshell? Savannah reveals that Harry didn’t leave the Delaneys’ school of his own volition. Rather, Joy convinced Harry’s dad to leave because she wanted Stan to focus on his own children, who were budding tennis players themselves.
Stan sees this as the ultimate betrayal. Savannah leaves the family, but her impact is felt months later. By Christmas, Stan and Joy are barely speaking and have an explosive fight.
Wait... Where Did Joy Go?
The tense situation makes Stan a natural suspect in the case of Joy’s disappearance, but what really happened is much weirder.
Joy and Stan had a big fight on Valentine’s Day, and he walked out of the house. While he was gone, Joy got a call from Savannah, who dropped her act and wanted to apologize. She tells Joy she’s about to embark upon a 21-day off-grid charity retreat, and Joy suggests she tags along.
Well, that’s where she went! It’s not until officers are moments away from arresting Dan that Joy returns, surprised at the investigation. She left a note, she explains, but it fell off the fridge and was eaten by the family dog, Steffi, who has a “fetish for paper.”
The ordeal seemingly has a healing effect on the Delaneys, surfacing their long-repressed family secrets so they can move forward in their lives and relationships.
As for Savannah herself? It’s revealed that months ago, she locked her sleeping mother in a room with protein bars, water, and a note to “ration carefully,” recreating the treatment she received as a child. It’s not clear what happened to her mother. But by the book’s end, Savannah’s on a plane and tells a fellow passenger that her mother plays tennis, signaling that she sees Joy as her own family now.
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Here are all the biggest changes between the book Apples Never Fall and the Peacock series
From key relationships to the ending, these are some of the biggest differences between the two works.
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Warning: This article contains spoilers for the book and the TV series Apples Never Fall .
As fans of Liane Moriarty 's family drama-cum-mystery novel Apples Never Fall tune in to the new Peacock series of the same name (now streaming), they'll notice some changes right off the bat.
While they both follow the seemingly perfect Delaney family , consisting of two newly retired tennis coaches and their four adult children — who are left reeling when a mysterious woman named Savannah enters their lives and their mother later goes missing — no adaptation is ever verbatim and some differences are always to be expected.
And as such, Apples Never Fall features some key changes that fans of the book might be surprised about. Ahead, EW breaks down some of the biggest tweaks from book to screen.
Vince Valitutti/PEACOCK via Getty
The physical differences
The most obvious, but perhaps least important, change from the book to the series involves the way the characters look. In the book, the Delaney family is described as mostly being a bunch of tall and dark tennis giants. But in the show, they're a lot more average-sized, with more fair hair and blue eyes mixed in. (To recap, the show's family consists of parents Sam Neill and Annette Bening as Stan and Joy, and Alison Brie , Jake Lacy , Conor Merrigan-Turner, and Essie Randles as their children Amy, Troy, Logan, and Brooke.)
The relationships
Several relationships between characters have been tweaked in the show. For instance, in the book, Brooke is married but separated from a man named Grant, but in the series, she's engaged to a woman named Gina. And in the show, Troy has an entire subplot dealing with an affair he's having with his boss' wife that is nonexistent in the book. Speaking of affairs, in the novel, Joy's long-ago affair with another man is explained as more of a one-off, drunken kiss-type situation that Stan is well aware of, but in the show it seems like it was more involved, even though she eventually broke it off and chose her family instead. It also becomes more of an issue between her and Stan in their pivotal fight. And if all that cheating wasn't enough, Brooke also hooks up with Savannah (played by Georgia Flood in the series) — largely because she thinks her fiancée is cheating on her — neither of which happen in the book.
The boat and the "body"
In the show, Logan works at the marina by day and does yoga by night. Instead of the police finding security cam footage of Stan loading what could be a dead body in a bag into his car like in the book, Stan uses a boat from the marina for his mysterious disposal. There's also a possibly ominous boat outing with Stan, Joy, and Savannah on the same boat before Joy goes missing, but the book makes no mention of any boats or aquatic outings.
Vince Valitutti/PEACOCK
In the show, Savannah has a more involved criminal past. We learn that she has used at least three different aliases across three states, and at one point detectives meet with a criminal accomplice of hers, whom she mysteriously paid $10k. She presumably got that money after blackmailing Troy about his affair, which of course doesn't happen in the book since Troy didn't have an affair (instead, he tries paying off Savannah to get her to leave). In the show, we also learn that after Harry the tennis star and his dad left Savannah (whose real name is Lindsay) and their mom, Savannah/Lindsay kind of lost it and started stalking Harry. At one point she broke into her brother's house with a gun, so he paid her $500k, retired from tennis, and prayed it was the end of his dealings with her.
Jasin Boland/PEACOCK
The endings of both the novel and the show are largely happy: Joy was never really missing; she ran off with Savannah to get away and do something for herself, and the Delaney family comes back together stronger than ever having worked through years and years of trauma. However, the similarities end there. On the page, Savannah and Joy went to a completely off-grid health retreat together, part ways at the end of it, and Joy returns home stunned to find everyone thinking she'd been killed. On screen, a cellphone-less Joy goes off with Savannah to her secret hideaway in the Georgia mountains (presumably paid for by the money she got off her brother, Harry) and Savannah cuts her own phone line. When Joy learns there was a hurricane back home, she insists on leaving, but when they do, Savannah violently crashes the car on their way out of town. Before running away from the scene of the crime, she asks Joy for forgiveness. Joy survives the accident and finds her way back home.
Additionally, while some childhood abuse is implied in the show between Savannah and her mother, the book ends with an entire subplot from Savannah's perspective revealing the extent of the abuse she suffered, and how, in revenge, she's been keeping her mother hostage. While we do ever-so-briefly meet Savannah and Harry's mom in the show, none of the rest of this plot is included in the final episode, and the last time we see Savannah, she's on the run and her fate is ultimately left up to the viewer.
All episodes of Apples Never Fall are now streaming on Peacock.
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Apples Never Fall
Recap, summary & spoilers.
The Full Book Recap and Chapter-by-Chapter Summary for Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty are below.
Ending & Explanations
See the Ending & Explanations for Apples Never Fall
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.
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 .
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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'”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In present day, Simon’s older sister, Liz Barrington , asks him about what he knows about Joy’s disappearance as he does her taxes.
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).
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
In present day, Ethan and Christina discuss Savannah’s aliases and her business selling fake tennis memorabilia.
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”.
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.
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.
In present day, Christina and Ethan finally think they have a motive for Joy’s possible murder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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
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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There are a lot of missing and dead women on TV. It’s not just zombie shows or procedurals, the prestige series has long been in on the game with feminine corpses powering entire series. In Peacock’s missing-woman mystery, “Apples Never Fall,” the beloved and powerful Annette Bening even potentially dons the trope.
As Joy Delaney, she’s the matriarch of a competitive tennis family with four adult children—none of whom went pro, much to the patriarch’s dismay. When she goes missing, the siblings confront a mix of explicit and implicit intergenerational trauma, grappling with the possibility that their father Stan, a perfectly difficult Sam Neill , may have had something to do with it.
What unfurls is Faulkernesque as we see Joy via her family’s flashbacks. She powers the plot but does so mostly in her absence as we see her from others’ points of view. Thanks to these perspectives, we do get a strong sense of who she was—the rock, the one who held it all together but somehow was invisible to those closest to her. More than once, one of her kids exclaims “She saved me.” But, when she was there, they largely took her for granted.
There’s a particularly devastating revelation that on the day she disappeared she called each of her four children, and none of them bothered to pick up their phones. In fact, we see her loneliness in her attachment to Savanah (Georgia Flood playing both warm and conniving to much effect). As we see, Savannah’s a lost soul who worms her way into the Delaney home, mostly by listening to Joy and helping her around the house (what a thought!)—things her own family has neglected for decades. There’s a scene where Joy tells Savanah, “No one breaks your heart like your own kids,” and that could very well be the moral of this story. “Apples Never Fall” becomes a treatise on the ways we fail women, big and small, which shouldn’t surprise as it’s based on a book by Liane Moriarty of “ Big Little Lies ” fame.
As the series moves about its plot—with a compelling mystery that remains open until the last episode—two tragedies compete in its framework. There’s Joy’s disappearance and potential violent death. And there’s the fact that despite “saving” her kids, despite loving them fiercely, taking care of them even when it meant sacrificing her own piece of mind, none of them truly value her. She’s done women’s work and despite it being literally lifesaving (not to mention creating), they refuse to see her. Even outside of the domestic sphere, she doesn’t get credit from her family until is perhaps too late—she was also a competitive tennis player in her own right and ran the club with her husband, but it’s Stan’s career that gets the kids’ and thus our attention.
The cast does the work to make this tension relatable and fraught. Allison Brie as elder daughter Amy inhabits her character’s woo-woo beliefs, building distinct mannerisms that telegraph her inner struggles. Under her thoughtful care, Amy isn’t a caricature or a wounded spirit, she’s a woman struggling to find her place when she’s so different from those who raised her. After his turn as the ever-petulant newlywed in “ The White Lotus ,” Jake Lacy is cornering the market for rich assholes with Troy Delaney. Troy makes his fair share of mistakes but seems more hurt this time around, someone with a festering father wound and no idea how to heal it. Likewise, younger siblings Brooke (Essie Randles) and Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) are all big, scared eyes—except for when they aren’t. Sometimes, even the most innocent Delaneys are the ones who lash out, unable to follow their mother’s example as it looms so small in their imagination.
Adding to the show’s smart layering, the setting reflects the characters’ privileges and faults. Their Maimi is one of tennis courts and country clubs, boats, and fancy cars. The Delaney home isn’t quite Nancy Meyers nice—it’s lovely but it feels lived in and a bit cluttered (better to hide their secrets in). This aesthetic reeks of respectability and the rough-play sense of themselves the Joy Delaney sells when she talks about her family. Likewise, the siblings’ homes show their arrested development with Troy in spacious modern (he’s a jerk!), Amy in a shared bungalow (she’s a mess!), Logan in nautical practical (he’s a lay about), and Brooke in well-lit cozy (she has a good thing but is going to mess it up!).
These elements, combined with its smart script and editing, build upon each other so that “Apples Never Fall” avoids the problems of the missing-or-dead-woman-as-learning-device. Bening never lets Joy fade. She is powerful when she needs to be, vulnerable and pensive all at once. In her, we see a portrayal of a flawed and dynamic woman who’s happy with her choices if not her current stage in life. The recent Oscar nominee for "Nyad" is such an extraordinary star that here she’s able to portray a warmth that allows others to skip over her accomplishments and edge, even as it does them all a disservice. It’s an arresting portrayal that insists on Joy’s humanity even when her story is being told by those who would negate it.
And perhaps that’s the real lesson in “Apples Never Fall”: to respect the mothers, the women, the adults who protected us when we couldn’t protect ourselves. That work is hard and dangerous, and we should value it at the highest level. That we don’t is the tragic flaw of our social structure.
Now, go call your mother.
Whole series screened for review. Premieres on Peacock tomorrow, March 14th.
Cristina Escobar
Cristina Escobar is the co-founder of LatinaMedia.Co, a digital publication uplifting Latina and gender non-conforming Latinx perspectives in media.
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Apples Never Fall (2024)
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‘Apples Never Fall' will finally bring Sam Neill back to the Emmys
P eacock’s “Apples Never Fall” is the latest limited series to adapt a book from Australian author Liane Moriarty, following the successes of “Big Little Lies” and “Nine Perfect Strangers.”
This one follows four adult children and their father trying to piece together the mysterious and unsettling disappearance of their mother, Joy (played by five-time Oscar nominee Annette Bening). Bening is, of course, sublime as she usually is but she is matched beat for beat by fellow veteran performer Sam Neill.
The New Zealand actor plays the family patriarch, Stan, and while Neill is usually a kindly figure (apart from his “The Omen” days - not much kindness there), he is here on gruff, stern form in what is one of his finest performances in this later stage of this career. Critics have noted that the series is at its best when Neill is on screen and allowed to shine.
Laura Babiak ( The Observer ) opined: “Neill does the best work of the bunch, his controlling patriarch concealing a bevy of insecurities and uncertainties.”
Felipe Rangel ( Screen Rant ) explained: “Neill delivers a magnetic performance as the gruff Stan. The character is a major force in the family’s life, with his relationship with each one of his children given the necessary focus and care. ‘Apples Never Fall’ makes great use of the ‘ Jurassic Park’ fan-favorite , with Neill delivering a compelling turn as Stan that keeps evolving as the series progresses, slowly peeling back the character’s layers and revealing how he became the person he is today and what that means to the rest of the family.”
Kelly Lawler ( USA Today ) summarized: “Neill balances the fine line between gruff and cruel, a symbol of a thousand baby boomer stereotypes without seeming derivative.”
Neill could, therefore, be in with a chance of an Emmy nomination for Best TV Movie/Limited Series Actor, which would be his first acting Emmy bid since 1998. That year, he was nominated for an Emmy in this same category for “Merlin,” so even though he’s only had one acting nomination overall, it was in the very category he is trying to compete in this year. That’s a good sign. By the way, Neill was also nominated for Best Narrator in 2017 for “New Zealand: Earth’s Mythical Islands.”
What also bodes well for Neill is that he is a veteran performer. Plenty of vets have been nominated in this category in recent years, including Michael Shannon (“George & Tammy”), Michael Keaton (“Dopesick”), Hugh Grant (“The Undoing”), Jeremy Irons (“Watchmen”), Jared Harris (“Chernobyl”), Antonio Banderas (“Genius: Picasso”), and Jeff Daniels (“The Looming Tower”).
Neill is best known for his work in “Jurassic Park,” in which he played Dr. Alan Grant in the first and third movies in the franchise. He returned to that role in 2022 when he, Jeff Goldblum, and Laura Dern reunited in their original roles in “Jurassic Park: Dominion.” That reprise will, in some ways, help his case here. It returned Neill to the mainstream eye and reminded people Neill is, actually, a pretty big movie star.
That return to the mainstream, combined with his performance here, feels like something of a renaissance for the New Zealander and this category loves nothing more than rewarding actors who go through a late-career renaissance. Recent such examples include Keaton (“Dopesick”), Grant (“The Undoing”), John Turturro (“The Night Of”), Geoffrey Rush (“Genius: Einstein”), Cuba Gooding Jr. (“The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story”), and Mark Rylance (“Wolf Hall”).
Plus, Neill’s movie background also helps. Plenty of movie stars have been nominated here, including the aforementioned collection of Keaton, Grant, Banderas, Rush, and Gooding Jr. as well as Daniel Radcliffe (“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”), Taron Egerton (“Black Bird”), Sebastian Stan (“Pam & Tommy”), Andrew Garfield (“Under the Banner of Heaven”), Oscar Isaac (“Scenes from a Marriage”), and Colin Firth (“The Staircase”).
Neill and Bening also make for a wonderful, complex, captivating on-screen couple. The fact that they are so good together could help boost each other to a nomination. Other on-screen duos to both earn nominations for limited series performances include Steven Yeun and Ali Wong (“Beef”), Shannon and Jessica Chastain (“George & Tammy”), Stan and Lily James (“Pam & Tommy”), Firth and Toni Collette (“The Staircase”), and Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen (“WandaVision”).
It’s also worth noting that Firth and Grant were nominated for shows in which they played husbands who were potentially involved in nefarious doings against their wives. That chimes in with Neill’s performance and role in “Apples Never Fall,” so Neill fits the bill here in a number of different ways, making that potential Emmys comeback feel all the more realistic.
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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 Apples Never Fall, 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.
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 ...
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 ...
Book Review. Apples Never Fall is the newest release from Liane Moriarty, a family drama with a little mystery woven in. Liane Moriarty has been a big name lately with the success of the adaptations of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers. Apples Never Fall opens after the matriarch of the Delaney family has seemingly gone missing.
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 ...
As with most Moriarty novels, Apples Never Fall contains family drama and secrets, with someone possibly concealing a murder. The Delaney family is full of sibling rivalry, a perhaps not-so-perfect marriage, and a lot of money that clearly doesn't buy happiness. And, tennis. A surprising amount of tennis.
APPLES NEVER FALL. 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 ...
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. She already has such an impressive career!
"Apples Never Fall," premiering Thursday on Peacock, is the third Liane Moriarty book to be adapted for television, following HBO's "Big Little Lies" and Hulu's "Nine Perfect ...
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 ...
Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty 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.
A perfect mix of humour, heartache and drama, Apples Never Fall is the ninth novel by best-selling Australian author, Liane Moriarty. When sixty-nine-year-old Joy Delaney goes missing on Valentine's Day after a garbled text message to her four children, they are understandably concerned, especially as certain things (an argument that morning, scratches on his cheek, a professional car clean ...
Annette Bening as Joy, Jake Lacy as Troy, Sam Neill as Stan in episode 1 of Apples Never Fall. Courtesy of Peacock. In Moriarty's novel, the Delaneys are Australian and live in Sydney. In the ...
Apples Never Fall's climax — and its last-minute return to the land of obtuseness — may leave some viewers dissatisfied, but the limited series is more about the journey than the destination. Anchored by rich performances from its ensemble cast, the efficient, handsomely made adaptation serves up family drama and high-stakes thrills in ...
Apples Never Fall is all about the Delany family, the parents, Stan and Joy, and their four children. After fifty years of marriage and all of their children leaving the nest, Stan and Joy decide to sell their tennis academy and start the golden years of their life. But things take a turn for the worse, and what Stan and Joy thought would be ...
And, yes, twisty deceit abounds. Peacock's Apples Never Fall is based on Moriarty's 2021 novel of the same name and revolves around the seemingly idyllic Delaney family: adult children Amy ...
Apples Never Fall follows the tennis-obsessed Delaney family, which includes two recently-retired parents and their four adult children. Matriarch Joy has gone missing, so there is an intriguing "what happened to mum?" plot to keep the pages turning. The thing that Liane Moriarty absolutely excels at is characterization.
The most obvious, but perhaps least important, change from the book to the series involves the way the characters look. In the book, the Delaney family is described as mostly being a bunch of tall ...
Book Details. From Liane Moriarty, the 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 each other . . .
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.
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 ...
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"Apples Never Fall" becomes a treatise on the ways we fail women, big and small, which shouldn't surprise as it's based on a book by Liane Moriarty of "Big Little Lies" fame. As the series moves about its plot—with a compelling mystery that remains open until the last episode—two tragedies compete in its framework.
Peacock's "Apples Never Fall" is the latest limited series to adapt a book from Australian author Liane Moriarty, following the successes of "Big Little Lies" and "Nine Perfect ...
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