Big Little Lies

Big Little Lies was published in July 2014 and made the New York Times bestseller list. It won the Davitt Award for Australian crime writing the following year. Liane Moriarty had been writing comic novels for a decade by then, and this book is the one that turned her into an international name; it is set in Sydney's Northern Beaches, and the school-gate community she describes is drawn from the kind of parenting culture she had been observing and writing about.

The novel's structure is the reason it works. Moriarty opens with the death and then goes back six months, threading in short police statements that identify the community's fault lines without revealing who died. The comedy of the school run and the trivia-night seating plan sits next to domestic violence, and the book's trick is that the two registers are not separate: the social stakes and the real danger are handled by the same characters in the same scenes.

It was adapted into an Emmy-winning television series in 2017 with Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, and a second season followed. The novel is a standalone, and it sits with the domestic suspense fiction on the shelf rather than with police procedurals, because the investigation is the frame rather than the plot. Moriarty's earlier novels are lighter comedies, and this is the book where the two halves of her writing met, with the school and the marriage in the same chapters.