At 400-plus pages, Moriarty’s follow-up is too long and offers too little reward, with menopause, vaping teens and even a stalker failing to raise the stakes
Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies was such a runaway success – debuting at No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and adapted for a television miniseries starring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Zoë Kravitz – that she always had her work cut out for her if she was to return the fluctuating narrative back to the page. Recognising this hurdle, Moriarty opens the sequel (her first) with a note to readers that details the way the new novel both responds to its TV adaptation – by making Laura Dern’s Renata and Meryl Streep’s Mary-Louise more central characters – and returns readers to the original landscape, the fictional Pirriwee Peninsula along Sydney’s northern beaches.
Moriarty immediately situates the reader back in Australia: a magpie swoops “like a missile” at an unsuspecting cyclist against a backdrop of “bright yellow native wattle” and “lush-purple” jacarandas. Time has passed, in both the real and fictional world. It has been 12 years since the 2014 publication of Big Little Lies, and the sweet kindergarteners at the heart of the original are teenagers now, with mothers in the midst of menopause. The idyllic setting is shattered when a severed human finger is posted to the local high school, setting the scene for a sequel packed with all the intrigue, drama and suspense of the first.
