Fans have waited 12 years for a Big Little Lies sequel — and now it's here
Topic:Books
A strange finger, a ghost town in Wyoming and a lonely book fan are in this month’s best new books. (ABC Arts: Nicola Heath)
Fans have waited 12 years for Liane Moriarty to release a sequel to her worldwide bestseller Big Little Lies — and now it is out. Claire Nichols read Big Little Truths before talking with Moriarty on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show this month, and shares her thoughts below.
Also this month is a “bravura” novel by a Tasmanian writer that is one 278‑page sentence; and a deep look at female friendship by a prize‑winning Dominican‑American author.
Happy reading!
Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason
Fourth Estate
Like her narrator Sophie, New Zealand‑born Meg Mason grew up in a religious sect. (Supplied: HarperCollins Australia)
Meg Mason’s follow‑up to her award‑winning Sorrow and Bliss introduces Sophie, a lonely sound technician who becomes obsessed with an author she has never met.
Sophie works at a writers’ festival, where her official job is to put headset microphones on famous authors before they go on stage. Unofficially, her job is to stay invisible. Don’t bother the talent, stay quiet and let them shine.
Sophie loves her job, and she is good at it. The friendly community she works with is a nice contrast to her home life, where she is recently, painfully separated from her husband, estranged from her best friend and missing her beloved brother, who has moved away.
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In her loneliness, Sophie remembers a quote from a famous author that seems to speak to her feelings. She reads another quote, then another. She then reads and re‑reads the author’s books, listens to podcast interviews and quietly builds a one‑way relationship with a stranger.
If this sounds odd, don’t worry — Sophie knows it too. But she thinks there is no problem. She will never actually meet the person she admires — or will she?
Mason’s third novel is strange and unique in the best way. It is not always clear why Sophie acts as she does, and her deep loneliness can feel uncomfortable. But stay with it. There is a larger story about power and those who hold it, and it hits hard.
— Claire Nichols
Now, Autonomy by Max Easton
Giramondo Publishing
Now, Autonomy is the third novel in Max Easton’s Sydney trilogy. (Supplied: Giramondo Publishing)
In the early morning after the Penrith Panthers’ historic comeback win in the 2023 NRL Grand Final, old friends Helen, Sunny and Sio walk home along a rundown stretch of Sydney’s Parramatta Road, wondering if they will ever feel a moment of transcendence like Panthers half‑back Nathan Cleary did in that game.
Helen’s housemate Pat shares his sadness. Constantly tired or hungover, he rarely leaves home except to work the sound desk at gigs. He rediscovers his unpublished memoir, which covers his early‑2000s glory days when he was a regular at protests and part of a collective that squatted in Homebush’s Midnight Star Theatre, turning it into a community hub before police shut it down.
Malaysian‑Australian author Omar Musa won the Miles Franklin Literary Award with his second novel, Fierceland, set between Malaysian Borneo and Sydney.
Featuring some of the same cast as The Magpie Wing (2021), long‑listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and Paradise Estate (2023), Now, Autonomy continues Easton’s detailed look at activist and underground music scenes in Sydney’s Inner West. It follows the characters’ frustration with gentrification and criticises a city full of empty buildings and a housing crisis.
Now, Autonomy shows these idealists burnt out. As Pat wonders, “When did everyone he knew become so jaded? When did everything start to feel like a cheap copy of something that already happened?” The group’s mindset changes when they rent the Lewisham Hotel (a real venue in this blend of fact and fiction) and turn it into The Quarterly, a base for small punk shows. It is a short‑lived win, but it encourages them to try bigger projects.
Released during a crisis in Sydney’s live‑music scene because many venues closed, Now, Autonomy bubbles with righteous anger and timely relevance. There is a satirical undercurrent — no one seems to realize they live in a fortified echo chamber — but also deep compassion for the characters as they dream of a better world while struggling not to be crushed by late‑stage capitalism.
— Daniel Herborn
Mine by Adam Ouston
Transit Lounge
Adam Ouston’s debut novel, Waypoints, was long‑listed for the 2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award. (Supplied: NewSouth Books)
After traveling four hours from Bridgewater to a rain‑soaked corner of western Tasmania, a “university lecturer, poet, bushwalker, activist” falls and cannot get up, to put it mildly. In his eighties, he is “old, so old” (and miserable) and, after parking his Land Rover to explore an abandoned mine, is now trapped at the bottom with no way out.
He is working on a project that has taken decades and may finally be finishing: a study of the “hauntology” of ghost towns. And, spoiler alert — this novel is a single 278‑page sentence. So what? Nothing to fear. With a style that resists a simple “in a nutshell” summary, the book is hard to condense: the nutshell is the voice itself, its ability to hold many ideas and viewpoints inside one long monologue.
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Ouston’s skill is that this long, winding narrative does not become vague or fuzzy. Instead, it is precisely imprecise. The story expands and contracts as we follow the narrator through time, memory, place and almost every possible pronoun he can find: you, he, we. There are small internal punctuation marks and chapter‑like repeats, too: recurring refrains and ideas, all of which keep you anchored while the narrator dives deep into Tasmania’s colonial history and the disaster of resource extraction, ending with a brilliant set piece about the 1912 North Mount Lyell disaster.
The sense of “mine” here is a place, a way of moving, a marker of ownership. Like Jen Craig — another local author influenced by Thomas Bernhard, a patron of the long‑sentence form — Ouston writes narratives that explore characters driven by projects that consume them, obsessively pursuing them while remaining, in some existential sense, trapped.
Fortunately, the same cannot be said of Ouston. This is a bravura work. No sophomore slump here: Mine builds on and exceeds the promise of his debut. It is funny. It is tender. It is fiercely good.
— Declan Fry
Take What You Can by Naima Coster
Trapeze
Naima Coster was one of the US National Book Foundation’s five Under‑35 honourees in 2020. (Supplied: Hachette Australia)
There is something intoxicating about the mix of intimacy and competition in stories of complex female friendship. I would happily fill my shelves with these novels — and put Dominican‑American writer Naima Coster’s third novel, Take What You Can, at the front.
Valeria and Milena are friends who are more like family. They first bonded on a university trip to Paris where they were the only two Black girls in the group. Both sacrificed and saved to be there and they clung to each other amid the privileged nonchalance of their peers.
Sheree Joseph always wanted to write the Great Australian Novel. Instead, her first book is a memoir about what happens when life does not meet expectations.
Even though their lives have taken different paths as adults, that moment stays with them. As Val reflects: “She could see them together, sunlit, wandering. On the shore of a calm, green lake. Smoking on the steps of an old church … Their first summer was still alive to her as if it had never stopped happening.” Also on this trip was the mysterious Helene, an older woman who formed the third part of their trio. In the present, Helene is noticeably missing, a ghost in their friendship whose absence has caused a silent rift.
The novel focuses on a time of change as both women navigate new motherhood. Battling their own histories and flaws, both characters are full and rich. We see their relationship from both sides and it is as tender as it is strained, with secrets and past resentments bubbling just below the surface, ready to erupt.
This is powerful writing. You taste the French wine, hear the ocean rumble and feel the deep love between the two characters. Coster balances the rich language with frank and insightful thoughts about money, power and attachment.
This book is for any reader who (like me) always looks for their next messy, obsessive and love‑filled novel about female friendship.
— Rosie Ofori Ward
Sunrise by Téa Obreht
W&N
Téa Obreht won the Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction) in 2011 for her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife. (Supplied: Hachette Australia)
Serbian‑born American novelist Téa Obreht is interested in Westerns, among many other things — or perhaps it is borders, histories and re‑working nationhood from a never‑obvious perspective that keeps her writing. Her earlier books include The Tiger’s Wife (set in a fictional Balkans) and Inland (with ghosts, camels and drought in 1890s Arizona). Now, in Sunrise, frontier mysteries and histories emerge from a valley and a ghost town.
The story opens in the present with a woman named Nina who appears to have fallen from a small plane and emerged from a cold lake into a puzzling landscape. But how do you survive falling from a plane into a lake? Was she pushed? Is she even alive?
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Wherever she is, her phone does not work and when she finds a town, there is no one there, no electricity or charging cords, and no real sign of life. Day by day, we learn about Nina, and then through various found documents and scavenged perspectives, we move into the history and myth‑making of this place. There are gunslingers and betrayal, a stagecoach stop and a robbery, infected wolves and contested origin stories for a town called Sunrise.
With great skill, Obreht takes us into the lives of characters across about 150 years of American storytelling, questioning the deep‑rooted tradition of national myth‑making. In this story, cowboys and town founders are Mexican, Native American, women and gay men. As the town grows and reinvents itself, we meet researchers and historians, as well as locals who want a particular version of commemoration and re‑enactment. Meanwhile, what is happening with Nina and her boyfriend, who was flying the plane that day the novel opened?
There is nothing gentle or safe about this complex, interwoven story. Our viewpoints shift, go underground, peek around corners and then become surprisingly cinematic and full of action. To hold it all together, the writing is as agile as the plot.
— Kate Evans
Paying Attention by Lynne Tillman
Thames and Hudson
Lynne Tillman is the author of more than 20 works of fiction, non‑fiction and short story collections. (Supplied: Thames and Hudson)
For me, criticism is not about judging or endorsing a work of art. It is more exploratory; an invitation for others to engage with the work and form their own opinions.
This is why reading Lynne Tillman is so refreshing. This collection of her criticism from more than four decades — from 1973 to 2025 — is a lovely introduction to her remarkable voice.
That voice is the thinking‑out‑loud kind. Tillman has a mesmerizing way of dancing through ideas, making unexpected connections, bringing it all back home as she moves from life to the street to poetry, dance, music, film, you name it. You feel you are in conversation with her as you read.
Curator, critic and writer Helen Ennis has won the National Biography Award for her landmark work, Max Dupain: A Portrait.
I love her way of practising criticism. Like her fiction, she is not there to judge. She is there to put things before the reader so the reader can continue their own conversations with them.
In Tillman, the critic is the subject of criticism as much as the work. Not as self‑praise but as (I think) its opposite: a form of chance‑taking. Of bravery. Refusing to believe the writer somehow exists outside the frame, sitting in silent, invisible judgement. The result often looks unassuming.
So unassuming it might look sloppy — until you realise it takes a lot of reflection and time and decisive action to choose to do things in ways that allow sloppiness, equivocation, uncertainty and thinking‑out‑loud to hold the floor. After an unexpected — and moving — reflection on the loss of her father, she writes: “Some people are generous and leave big spaces for others. As an author, I hope I am; I know I want to leave space for readers, so they can put their imaginations to work and make a story theirs.”
— Declan Fry
Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell
Picador
Rebecca Birrell told Frieze she reread Iris Murdoch’s 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea several times while working on her debut novel. (Supplied: PanMacmillan Australia)
How intoxicating to imagine the daring boldness of Berlin’s queer nightclub scene in the 1920s and 30s. Bodies, clothes and hair in new forms; revolutionary music and ideas. But don’t forget the danger, because something terrible was coming for all of it — and in her debut novel, art historian and academic Rebecca Birrell takes us into both the thrill of Weimar and the heart‑pounding threat of Nazism through the eyes of her protagonist, Hannah.
The mention of clothing is not trivial but deliberate. Hannah is a seamstress and mender of things; a young working‑class Jewish woman who understands the intimacy of assessing bodies and rips in fabric, looking at stains and hems and life’s objects worn very thin. She also longs for art and wants a different future for herself than that defined by pinpricks and soap‑worn hands. She runs away from home to try to make it alone — or as alone as you can be in a boarding house, exchanging stories and testing boundaries.
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Hannah wants to draw and paint, and she does it wherever and however she can. She sketches women in the nightclubs she has discovered. “I wanted women with a dark, severe energy, but they were rare,” she thinks. “Most were wild in a temporary way, just as I was.”
But her art and style are unschooled, not part of the new political modernism that both critiqued and confronted fascism, and her work is co‑opted by the Nazis as part of their argument about so‑called ‘degenerate art’. This and more of a complicated history is properly embedded into the novel, with nuance and imagination. The result is not a “knowing” novel that looks back at history with heavy‑handed hindsight but one that looks forward — while we try not to breathe out as we know what is coming for the world.
— Kate Evans
Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty
Macmillan Australia
Liane Moriarty has written 11 novels and three children’s books. (Supplied: PanMacmillan Australia)
Australian writer Liane Moriarty returns with her long‑awaited sequel to the 2014 bestseller Big Little Lies.
Forget the Californian beaches and Hollywood faces of the Emmy‑winning TV adaptation, which starred Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. This sequel returns the story to its original setting, the fictional coastal suburb of Pirriwee in Sydney. It is a place where beautiful women practice beachside yoga in designer activewear, and a severed finger has just been mailed to the local school principal.
She is one of the world’s most successful authors — with more than 20 million copies sold worldwide and high‑profile Hollywood adaptations — however, Liane Moriarty might never have started writing if it were not for her sister.
Moriarty always had a great talent for plot and pacing, and she is in sparkling form here. The police investigation into the mysterious finger plays out beside interviews with precocious high‑school students, transcripts of the parent WhatsApp chat (mined for its full comic potential) and the drama‑filled lives of our three key mothers, Madeline, Celeste and Jane. These women are a decade older than in the last book, and life has given them a whole new raft of challenges. Thirty‑something Jane does not want to have a baby with her dreamy husband, Celeste is working through the terrors of dating in her 50s, and Madeline is tackling hormonal change, a daughter’s wedding and a very sick husband, all at once.
There is all the darkness you would expect from a Moriarty novel — we know the finger belongs to someone — but despite it all, Big Little Truths is remarkable for how utterly joyful it is. I laughed out loud and was reminded just how sharp Moriarty’s powers of observation can be. With this return to home turf, she skewers modern parenting, politics and perimenopause with laser focus.
— Claire Nichols
Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10 am Mondays for The Book Show and 10 am Saturdays for The Bookshelf.
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