57 pages • 1 hour read
Liane MoriartyThe Last Anniversary
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-14 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: The source text and this section guide contain material relating to postpartum depression, suicidal ideation, and homicidal ideation.
Two female characters whose names are not revealed wonder whether they can commit an undisclosed crime without being caught.
Chapter 2 Summary
Veronika interviews her aunt Connie about the mysterious disappearance of Alice and Jack Munro. Connie says that she thinks marriage is hard work.
Chapter 3 Summary
In Sydney, Sophie Honeywell receives a call from her ex-boyfriend Thomas Gordon, asking to meet up with her for a drink to discuss something serious. He tells her that his aunt Connie died. Sophie and Thomas have not spoken in three years, and she is confused about why Connie’s death would start a conversation between them.
Sophie ponders their relationship. Thomas was the grandson of the Munro baby, a baby related to a mystery on Scribbly Gum Island that is a source of fascination for Sophie. Sophie considers that Thomas was too serious and methodical for her. The day she decided to break up with him, he had a secret elaborate proposal planned. He had enlisted all of their friends and family to facilitate the surprise, which included flying her to Fiji. Thomas’s sister, Veronika, who introduced the two of them, was furious when Sophie broke up with Thomas and did not speak to Sophie for months.
Soon after, Thomas met a travel agent named Deborah; they are now married and have a daughter. Sophie has been single since breaking up with Thomas, going on a string of dates that entertain her married friends as anecdotes. She is 39 years old and is worried about running out of time to start a family.
Chapter 4 Summary
On Scribbly Gum Island in 1932, 19-year-old Connie Doughty is interviewed by a young reporter, Jimmy Thrum. He is reporting on the disappearance of her neighbors, Alice and Jack Munro, who apparently fled their island home, abandoning their baby daughter. Connie tells how she and Rose were invited to their neighbors’ house but found only the empty house, a boiling kettle, a warm cake, and a crying baby. She is very attracted to Jimmy; he is very intrigued by the mystery. He compares it to the mystery of the Mary Celeste, a ship that was found floating in the Atlantic without its passengers.
Connie describes how the police do not view this disappearance as very pressing; like much of the world, Australia is experiencing the Great Depression, and it is not uncommon for people to abandon their homes. Connie and her sister, Rose, have taken in the baby. Connie’s father, a widower with PTSD as a result of service in World War I, never met the Munro family and does not know what happened to them. The baby starts crying. Connie sees that Rose is emotionally distressed and unable to care for the baby. Jimmy asks Connie if she is single.
Chapter 5 Summary
An excerpt from the Munro Baby Mystery brochure, available on Scribbly Gum Island, describes the features of the home, which has not been touched since 1932, when Alice and Jack went missing. Connie and Rose named the baby Enigma. Enigma went on to have two daughters, Margaret and Laura. Margaret is married to Ron, and they are the parents of Veronika and Thomas. Laura is divorced, and she is the mother of Grace.
Chapter 6 Summary
Chapter 7 Summary
Margie listens to Enigma and Rose debate how Connie should be buried. Margie believes herself to be overweight, so she is starting a strict diet. Connie seems to have sensed her own death, as she prepared several frozen meals for her family. The family are excited that Thomas will meet with Sophie again.
Chapter 8 Summary
Thomas is very happy in his new life with his wife and child. Sophie is relieved not to be like Deborah, at home with the baby. Thomas tells Sophie that Connie has left Sophie her house. Sophie is astonished and begins to blush, a chronic medical condition that she developed in elementary school. She and her friend Eddie Ripple were ostracized because she blushed uncontrollably and Eddie had a facial twitch. Sophie still violently blushes as an adult.
Sophie cannot believe that Connie left the house to her instead of to Veronika or Grace. Veronika does not yet know about the house, and both Thomas and Sophie anticipate that she will be furious. Thomas gives Sophie a letter that Connie wrote to her, explaining her reasoning.
Chapter 9 Summary
Chapter 10 Summary
Chapter 11 Summary
An excerpt from the Scribbly Gum Island website reveals some of the island’s history: Connie’s grandfather won the island in a bet. The island is now a popular tourist destination because of the disappearance of Jack and Alice.
Chapter 12 Summary
Callum has gone back to work, and Grace has her first day home alone with their baby, Jake. She feels she is struggling to maintain a sense of identity as she cares for her son. Callum is thriving as a father, but Grace does not feel that she is a good mother. Grace remembers falling in love with Callum, a high school music teacher, and believing that their love was unique and otherworldly. She accepts that their relationship has changed from its passionate beginning, and she now occasionally feels irritation toward her husband. Callum is very loving but very messy. Grace, Callum, and Jake are temporarily staying in Grace’s mother’s house on Scribbly Gum Island while their dream home in the Blue Mountains is being built.
Grace is disconcerted to realize that she has been staring at a milk carton for an hour and a half. She needs to bake the cake for the Munro House tour. She describes feeling like an impostor in her new role as a mother and feels unmotivated to tackle her long to-do list of domestic tasks. She takes her turn leading a group tour of the Munro House and continues to feel inadequate and alienated when watching a group of women interact with Jake.
Chapter 13 Summary
Sophie ponders her obsession with Regency romances and wonders if this has created unrealistic expectations for her own romantic life. Her friends encourage her to pursue internet dating. She considers how much she enjoys her single life that allows her to sleep in and do what she wants. She remembers meeting Aunt Connie and being enamored of her home. Veronika tells Sophie that she will contest Connie’s will. Sophie acknowledges that she was partially motivated to befriend Veronika because she was always fascinated by the Munro Baby mystery and saw Veronika as a link to the island. She also desperately wants to befriend Grace. She wonders if inheriting Connie’s house is part of her destiny.
Chapter 14 Summary
Grace works on her children’s book, but her plots become increasingly dark and her characters experience violent emotions that reflect her own turmoil. She has never struggled before to write and illustrate. Because she is a children’s book author, people assume she is inherently good with children. Before she was pregnant, she and Callum had a very idealistic vision of what parenthood could look like for them. She is frustrated and disappointed that she is finding the reality so different. She continues to be intensely distracted and to lose track of time, which she considers to be worrying behavior.
Chapters 1-14 Analysis
Moriarty’s novel is narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator who can access all the characters’ thoughts and feelings. During this first section of the novel, Moriarty provides detail and exposition about her world-building, especially through the use of diegetic writing. The Scribbly Gum Island brochure offers background and provides the reader with information about the disappearance of Jack and Alice. From this, the reader learns that the Munro house has been preserved for seven decades. Tour groups are invited in, but the family has allegedly worked to keep the house as it appeared in the 1930s so as to create a sense of authenticity. This narrative device enables Moriarty to give the reader crucial background information, and to set up the historical mystery plotline, without being obliged to create awkward exposition in her characters’ dialogue or internal monologues. These first chapters also set up a sense of mystery through shifts in time which both reveal and conceal information, creating suspense. During Connie’s interview, Jimmy notes the similarities between the disappearance of Jack and Alice and the disappearance of the Mary Celeste. Connie is careful to seem as if she does not know very much about the missing ship; it is clear to the reader that she knows more than she lets on. At this point in the text, the reader does not know the answer to the Jack and Alice mystery, and is invited to speculate about the circumstances surrounding their disappearance. Based on the clues dropped by the scene, it seems most likely that Jack and Alice fled due to financial circumstances.
Moriarty also immediately establishes that the focus of the novel is on the interior lives of women, many of whom are overlooked by other characters, especially by male characters. This is key to the theme of Female Solidarity and Secrets. Although the focus is on women, many of the female characters are depicted defining themselves in relation to men. Sophie is content but believes that she is missing out by being single. Margie feels inadequate and overweight thanks to her husband’s constant criticism. Connie was fiercely independent before meeting Jimmy, but she is attracted to him because he wants to complement her independence rather than trying to quell it. This early section of the novel sets up these tensions around female image and self-esteem in relationships and against social expectations, creating the issues that will be worked through in the novel as the characters and plotlines develop.
The novel establishes Sophie as a complex and not always sympathetic character. Sophie acknowledges to herself that she was mostly motivated to befriend Veronika not because of Veronika’s personality but because of Sophie’s fascination with the Munro Baby mystery. Sophie does not feel particularly guilty about this because Veronika was very dominant and possessive in their friendship, but this aspect of Sophie’s history presents her as a character who is capable of using others for her own purposes. This dynamic also makes Veronika a more complex character and the relationship between the two women less of a binary heroine-versus-villain paradigm. Sophie is also shown as someone who has suffered in her own way from others’ behavior. Although Sophie was initially ostracized as a child because of her chronic blushing, she has since overcome this; she is now a social butterfly whose blushing is seen as endearing instead of justification for teasing by those around her.
Through the character of Grace, Moriarty offers a graphic depiction of the difficulties of postpartum depression, a condition that, although not uncommon in life, is rarely depicted or explored in contemporary novels. This treatment is essential to the novel’s theme of Loss of Identity in Relationships (Romantic and Maternal). Grace feels as if her identity has completely transformed; rather than having time to feel like an individual, she finds that her day-to-day life is consumed only by caregiving, cooking, and cleaning. Her husband appears to be supportive, but he does not offer her the space to be emotionally honest, and he frequently reduces or downplays her concerns. Grace feels tremendously guilty that she has not bonded with her baby to the extent that she believes she should and feels envious of her husband for seeming to easily bounce from his daytime identity as a teacher to his nighttime identity as a father. Because she is breastfeeding, she is also responsible for nurturing her child in a way that his father cannot, and this sense of tremendous responsibility contributes to her sense of isolation. Her sense of identity is thus affected across both her relationship types, maternal and romantic.
The interpolations of Grace’s children’s book offer information about Grace’s mental state. Grace is a shy person who prefers to express herself through art and writing rather than through conversation. Because she is beautiful, her shyness often makes her appear standoffish. As she drafts her children’s book, her cartoonish characters express violent or adult desires. These interpolations are a means for Moriarty to demonstrate Grace’s inner turmoil without requiring Grace’s inner monologue to be fully aware. While the novel adopts some dark humor in the way that Grace’s elf character, Gublet, expresses murderous desire, the reader also understands Grace’s situation to be alarming since she cannot express her extreme emotions to her husband or family members and is not seeking help.
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