Alice Love of Sydney, Australia, falls off her bike in spin class one day and, when she comes to, she’s not quite right in her head. Who are all these people calling my name? I think I’m pregnant. It’s 1998, right? It’s not? It’s 2008?!

And the surprises keep coming. Why is my husband in Portugal? Why did he yell at me on the phone? Why is my sister Elisabeth all puffed out “as if someone had blown her up like a plastic pool toy”? And what is this red dress in my gym bag, a dress I can’t possibly fit into? What’s this personal trainer doing at my front door?

Alice’s worries and confusions charmed me on nearly every page of Liane Moriarty’s book What Alice Forgot. The poor woman is so disoriented by this so-called 2008 that she just wants to call her mom, but what makes her think her mom still has the same phone number?

She fakes it, telling people her memory is coming back “in bits and pieces,” but as everybody around Alice catches her up on what’s she was doing before she fell off that bike, they see only blank looks. “You don’t remember, do you?” they say. A lot.

Sister Elisabeth is just happy that Alice calls her up on the phone, crying and babbling. “Even though she has had much to cry about over the past year, she doesn’t cry in front of me.”

What Alice does remember are magical nights during her courtship with husband Nick — a creamy cocktail, some fireworks bursting in the sky, the feel of his hand on her back.

She remembers them talking to their first baby in utero.

So why, again, is he yelling at her on the phone? Why is this school mum or that neighbor not speaking to her?

What Alice Forgot is a bright gem of a story about second chances. Moriarty kept me guessing about Alice and Nick’s marriage right up to the last pages.

Photo credit: K Wudrich on Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-SA