Liane Moriarty

Liane Moriarty is an Australian author of smart, darkly funny domestic thrillers and women's fiction whose Big Little Lies became a global bestseller and acclaimed television series.

Liane Moriarty has built a distinctive niche in the domestic thriller/women’s fiction space: her books are genuinely funny, populated by sharply observed middle-class characters in suburban settings, and structured so that the comic tone gradually deepens into something darker and more uncomfortable. She understands that humor and menace can coexist, and she uses that combination better than almost anyone working in her genre.

Big Little Lies, published in 2014, follows three mothers at an elite Sydney school in the lead-up to a murder at the school trivia night. The structural device — snippets of police interviews and community gossip interspersed with the main narrative — creates suspense without withholding so much information that it feels manipulative. More importantly, the novel takes seriously the social dynamics of wealthy parenthood, competitive femininity, and domestic abuse, using the thriller scaffolding to explore questions about what women protect and what they refuse to see. It is considerably more substantial than its genre positioning suggests.

Moriarty’s other books vary in quality; some feel like lighter entertainments that deploy the same formula without the same depth of character work. She is also not a stylist — her prose is efficient and warm but not particularly distinctive. But at her best, she writes novels that do something genuinely difficult: make you laugh and make you uncomfortable about what you’re laughing at, sometimes in the same sentence.