The Last Anniversary

The Munro Baby Mystery

In 1932, two adults disappeared from a house on Scribbly Gum Island, leaving behind a perfectly cared-for baby and no explanation that anyone has ever been able to substantiate. The baby survived. The adults were never found. The island became famous.

This is the premise Liane Moriarty builds The Last Anniversary around, and it is a good one — a genuinely puzzling historical mystery that the novel parcels out across its present-day narrative without ever letting it become the only thing. The Munro Baby Mystery functions as the island’s founding myth and its primary industry: tourist boats circle the house, local women give talks, and the mystery is the reason the community exists in the form it does. Moriarty uses it structurally, the way a good mystery writer uses a locked room — not as the answer to every question, but as the question that keeps everything else in motion.

What Moriarty understands about this kind of mystery is that its power lies in its unsolvability. A solved mystery is a closed door; an unsolved one is a hall of mirrors. The women who live on Scribbly Gum Island have grown up with this particular hall of mirrors as their backdrop, and their relationship to it — some reverential, some indifferent, some privately certain — tells us almost everything we need to know about them before Moriarty shows us anything directly.

Sophie and the Island Community

Sophie Honeywell is forty, single, and has just watched the man she turned down years ago marry someone else. When her great-aunt Connie dies and leaves her a house on Scribbly Gum Island, Sophie inherits not just property but an entire community she has no framework for navigating.

The island’s population is largely female, largely eccentric, and organized around a set of customs and relationships that have been developing for decades. Moriarty is at her best when she is writing women in domestic proximity — the particular texture of how women who know each other too well speak to and around each other, the kindnesses that shade into control and the cruelties that shade into care. The ensemble here includes Connie’s daughter Rose, who is unexpectedly postpartum and struggling; Aunt Enigma, whose certainty about everything is its own kind of problem; and a rotation of in-laws and neighbors whose loyalties are all slightly misaligned.

What Sophie’s outsider position provides is a structural vantage point. She does not know the codes and therefore notices them. She does not know the history and therefore asks about it. The novel uses her arrival the way a detective story uses the arrival of the investigator — as the mechanism that gets people talking about things they would otherwise never mention.

Domestic Comedy and the Mystery Thread

The Last Anniversary is often funny. Moriarty has always had a talent for domestic comedy — for the specific absurdity of family dinners, social obligations, and the performances people maintain for relatives they barely like. That talent is more prominent here than in her later work, and the novel is lighter for it without being trivial.

The comedy and the mystery operate in counterpoint. Scenes of genuine emotional weight — a mother struggling with a baby she loves but cannot quite connect with, a woman confronting what she actually wants from a life she assembled without fully choosing — are followed by scenes of broad social comedy. The transitions work because Moriarty is not playing the two registers against each other. She understands that domestic life has always contained both, that the farcical and the serious are not alternatives but constant neighbors.

The mystery, when it resolves, does so in a way that is satisfying within the novel’s own terms. It is not a twist ending in the conventional sense — the revelation recontextualizes relationships rather than overturning plot — which is the right choice for a book more interested in why people do things than in what they did.

Where It Sits in Moriarty’s Career

The Last Anniversary was published in 2004, before Big Little Lies, before The Husband’s Secret, before the decade of work that made Moriarty one of the most widely read novelists in English. Reading it now, the structural intelligence that characterizes her later fiction is already present and already working: the multiple-perspective narration, the ensemble of women whose separate storylines eventually converge, the use of a central secret to organize a sprawling domestic narrative. The tools are all here.

What is different is the intensity. Moriarty’s later novels push their darker material harder — the violence in Big Little Lies, the moral weight in Truly Madly Guilty, the psychological claustrophobia in The Husband’s Secret. The Last Anniversary sits at a lighter altitude. The stakes are real but not devastating, the comedy is more prominent, and the overall effect is warmer. For some readers this will register as a limitation. For others it makes the novel the most accessible place to begin.

Our rating: 3.5/5 — An earlier, lighter Moriarty — less intense than the novels that made her famous, but built on the same structural intelligence, with a historical mystery at its center that earns its place and an ensemble of women drawn with real warmth.