Big Little Truths

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The morning mail at Pirriwee High contains a severed finger. The principal opens the package, and by lunchtime every parent on the peninsula has heard. Ten years have passed since a school trivia night ended with a man dead at the bottom of a staircase. The women who stood at the top of those stairs are still friends, their children are now in Year 10, and the story they agreed on to protect five year olds is much harder to hold together around teenagers who ask questions.

Each of the five has her own trouble. Madeline finds a lump. Celeste is still living with the fallout of Perry's death, and now his mother Mary Louise is behaving strangely under her roof. Jane's marriage has reached a fork. Bonnie has learned that yoga only takes you so far. Renata, of all people, is thriving. Then a stranger starts turning up near the school, asking questions that sound innocent and are not.

Liane Moriarty spent a decade saying she would never write a sequel to Big Little Lies. She changed her mind, and the result reads like a return visit rather than a rerun. The question this time is not who died. It is what the kids know.

The teenagers steal it

Moriarty has said that watching her own children and their friends reach their teens gave her the book. Some kids grew into exactly the people you expected. Others turned out the opposite. That idea runs through every chapter, as the parents of Pirriwee discover how little they know about what their children do with drugs, alcohol and each other.

She has also admitted the teenagers were the easiest part to write, because no actor has played them yet. They still feel like hers. It shows. The teen scenes are the freshest material here, funnier and angrier than the adult drama around them. A charismatic new history teacher who runs a beach boot camp for students and parents gives the plot a second engine.

What the critics make of it

Kirkus Reviews praised the sparkling writing and said the sequel works even for people who never read the first book or watched the show. The Guardian's Bec Kavanagh was less convinced. She found the lurking stranger too obviously signalled to be frightening, the ending heavy handed, and the whole thing too long for what it delivers. She also found real warmth in it, and called it a relief to see these women united rather than tearing each other apart.

Both readings are fair. This is a roomy novel that spends more time on friendship, menopause, marriage and the aftermath of abuse than on its thriller plot. Come for the mystery alone and the back half may sag. Come for the women and it delivers.

Why the audio is the version to get

Caroline Lee narrated the original Big Little Lies audiobook, and Random House Audio has brought her back for the adult women. Her Madeline is still sharp and quick, her Celeste still careful, and she gives each of the five a distinct register without tipping into caricature. Ella Le Fournour takes the teenage chapters, and the split works. The kids sound like kids, and the handover between narrators marks the shift between the two worlds of the book.

The accents matter more than you might expect. The HBO series moved the story to California, but the novel stays in Sydney, and hearing it in Australian voices puts it back where it belongs. One book blogger who loved the production wished for a few more distinct voices across such a large cast, which is a fair note. At around fifteen hours it is a long listen, but the short chapters make it easy to pick up and put down.

The author who said never

Liane Moriarty lives in Sydney and published her first novel, Three Wishes, in 2003. Big Little Lies arrived in 2014 and made her a household name, helped by the HBO series with Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. Nine Perfect Strangers and Apples Never Fall have since been adapted too, and her books have sold more than twenty million copies.

The sequel began with an email from Reese Witherspoon asking whether a follow up was possible. It landed in Moriarty's spam folder. Her standard answer had always been that she had put her characters through enough. Ten years on, with her own children grown into teenagers, she wanted to know what happened next.

She has been open that the show shaped this book. Mary Louise did not exist in the original novel, and Meryl Streep's performance made her impossible to leave out. Renata was a minor character on the page until Laura Dern made her unforgettable, so she has a much bigger part here. Newcomers can start with this book, but it lands harder if you listen to Big Little Lies first. The Audible free trial covers both.