AustLit

'Years ago, at age 13, Sarah Harden wrote to Jana Wendt to express respect for the journalist's intelligence, humour and ability to handle Mick Jagger calling her "bossy boots".'

'You know you've read a great book when it changes how you move through the world. That's how I felt after reading Big Little Lies, Australian author Liane Moriarty's sixth and best-known novel (thanks in part to its adaptation as an award-winning HBO TV series starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman). Moriarty's creative genius in this book, as in all her work, is to scrutinise a group of ordinary people forced to co-exist in an emotionally and morally charged situation. ' (Introduction)
 

'Madeline Martha Mackenzie, the central character in Liane Moriarty’s best-selling novel Big Little Lies, thinks of Pirriwee, the fictional suburb on Sydney’s northern beaches where she lives, and where the action of the novel takes place, as a ‘country village.’ This is a signpost to Jane Austen’s oft-quoted statement ‘Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.’ As a definition of the scope and subject matter of a novel written in the mode of domestic realism, Austen’s formulation has established a major tradition within English-language fiction.'  (Introduction)