Liane Moriarty confirms Big Little Lies sequel, as she launches new book

Spending hours on an airport tarmac, stuck on a delayed flight, inspired Liane Moriarty’s new novel. Looking around, she wondered how her fellow passengers would meet their end: will you be the one who has an unexpectedly early death? Will you be the one who lives to 100?

Called Here One Moment, the novel’s premise can’t be revealed without spoilers, but it interrogates how to live a good life, fate and free will. It’s told from various people’s perspectives, part of what makes Moriarty’s novels ripe for adaptation.

In exciting news for fans, she told this masthead that she is working on a sequel to the enormously popular Big Little Lies, which was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning series for HBO starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon.

Author Liane Moriarty revealed she is working on a sequel to Big Little Lies.Credit: Uber Photography

“It’s the first of my books where I think, actually that does make sense, I could write a sequel,” she says. “There does seem to be a desire for a possible new season – not that I’m confirming a new season.

“In the first one, the children are all starting school, which is what my children were doing at the time that I wrote it and now my children are teenagers. I’m very interested in stories involving parenting teens.”

As Moriarty prepares to tour the country to talk about Here One Moment, she reflects on its genesis on that plane. “I had mortality on my mind as I sat there on that flight,” she says.

Stuck in her thoughts after a week spent alone writing, she got thinking about death. “What blew my mind was the fact that at some point in the future that information would be available, that we would know exactly how and when each of us had died, including myself.”

Released on Thursday, the best-selling author’s latest book explores fate and destiny, ideas that hit close to home after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021 (her sister was treated for it a few years before), her father’s death and the pandemic.

Liane Moriarty is writing a sequel to Big Little Lies. Credit: HBO

When one character tells his wife it’s been foretold he will die in a workplace accident, her reaction is immediate: quit your job. Despite becoming increasingly fearful the prediction will come true, he insists leaving is not an option.

“We all have to tread that fine line between accepting what you can and you can’t control. It’s a difficult lesson when you think you’ve got everything under control and life throws you a curveball,” Moriarty says.

“I don’t think much is pre-destined. Fate is a lovely thing to believe in when it comes to good things… but where it all goes wrong is when people suffer terrible things. I feel like it’s a privileged way to think.”

As you get older, you reflect on how you live your life, Moriarty says. “Just savouring the precious moments but also accepting that plenty of moments are not precious; it’s not possible to savour every one.”

Liane Moriarty is at the Capitol Theatre, Melbourne, on August 29 and in Sydney at the Parade Theatre, NIDA, on August 30.

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