When Liane Moriarty sat down to write the long-awaited sequel to her bestselling novel Big Little Lies two years ago, she hit a roadblock. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern or Meryl Streep out of her head.
A few things had changed since 2014, when Moriarty conjured the story of a group of school mums who become entangled in a homicide. Big Little Lies, which made The New York Times Best Seller list, was adapted in 2017 into a hit HBO series starring the aforementioned A-listers.
Suddenly, the world Moriarty had created from her home office in Sydney’s North Shore was no longer hers. The setting shifted from Sydney to California, storylines were tweaked (no more Vegemite), and each actor brought their own interpretation to Moriarty’s beloved characters. So when it came to writing the sequel, Big Little Truths, she had to find a way back to her original characters while also accounting for the versions audiences had come to know and love.
“It would be disingenuous to pretend the adaptation hasn’t had an impact on this novel,” Moriarty says. “Renata Klein was a minor character, but Laura Dern inhabited her so perfectly that there was no way I could write a sequel without her in it. The same with Mary Louise, who was played by Meryl Streep.”
Big Little Lies isn’t the first of Moriarty’s novels to make the leap from page to screen, but it is her first to get a sequel. In 2021, the TV series adaptation of her 2018 novel, Nine Perfect Strangers, starred Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy, Samara Weaving and Asher Keddie; in 2024, her 2021 book, Apples Never Fall, became a miniseries with Alison Brie and the late Sam Neill; and in 2025, her 20-year-old novel, The Last Anniversary, was led on screen by Teresa Palmer and Danielle Macdonald.
Big Little Truths picks up a decade after the first novel’s homicide, when an anonymous package containing a severed finger arrives at the local school. It’s classic Moriarty: sharp, suspenseful and full of unexpected twists.
The other big change for Moriarty was the age of her characters. The first novel centred on young children; this time, they’re teenagers. The timing was perfect, as Moriarty had originally drawn inspiration for Big Little Lies from her experience with young kids. Now that her own children, George and Anna, are in their teens, she found herself with a new source of inspiration. “I could tell that there’d be a wealth of material once I became a parent of teenagers,” she says. “Watching my children and their friends grow up, there were some kids who became exactly who you imagined they would be, and then there were others who turned out to be the complete opposite. That gave me the freedom to think that the kids in Big Little Lies could turn out however I wanted them to be.”
For Moriarty, writing the teenage versions of these children also offered a chance to reclaim them from their on-screen counterparts. “I love [these] teenagers because they’re not complicated by the actors. I loved the way the actors played them, but at the moment they still feel like they’re mine.”
Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty (Macmillan, $34.99), is out August 25.
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