Here One Moment

A woman upends strangers’ lives by predicting their deaths in the powerful latest from bestseller Moriarty (Apples Never Fall). Travelers aboard a delayed flight from Hobart, Australia, to Sydney are already on edge when a woman stands, points at a fellow passenger, and pronounces, “I expect catastrophic stroke. Age seventy-two.” She moves down the aisle, foretelling the causes and ages of death of several more passengers before the cabin crew intervenes. She then sleeps until landing and disembarks as though nothing had happened. Most assume the “soothsayer” has mental health problems—until one of her prognostications comes true three months later. Everyone is rattled, but none more than the other passengers she hit with premonitions: a nurse apparently slated to get terminal cancer, a young mother and swim instructor whose child will supposedly drown, and starry-eyed newlyweds whose marriage (which their families look down upon) will purportedly end in “intimate partner homicide.” Moriarty’s meticulously plotted tale—which follows each of the doomed passengers as they reckon with their alleged fate—rivets even as it thoughtfully contemplates free will, determinism, and the value of living passionately. The exquisitely rendered characters earn readers’ full investment as they contemplate how much credence to give the Damoclean sword hanging over their heads, and the pinwheeling narrative maintains near-constant tension. Moriarty has outdone herself. Agent: Faye Bender, the Book Group. (Sept.)