Liane Moriarty, author of the best-selling Big Little Lies, which led to an Emmy-award winning two seasons of the HBO adaptation, has put pen to paper for a sequel book, Big Little Truths. HBO CEO Casey Bloys teased this source material in November 2024.
Set 10 years after the events of the first book, Big Little Lies will publish Aug. 25. Much like Laura Dave’s sequel The First Time I Saw Him, set five years after the original The Last Thing He Told Me and inspiring SEason 2 of the Apple TV series, Moriarty’s next book in the luxurious beachside universe will serve as the basis for Season 3 of Big Little Lies. Deadline reported last year that Season 3 recruited Mr. and Mrs. Smith co-creator, executive producer and showrunner Francesca Sloane to write the first episode.
“Right from the beginning, because of the show, there was talk about writing a sequel, but I was never interested right away because you put your characters through so much and it just didn’t make sense to me to write something that followed on directly,” Moriarty told USA Today. “A time jump always made sense to me.”
The children of characters played by Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern and more will take center stage in this next installment. The author took inspiration from her children becoming teenagers.
The summary for Big Little Truths teases a strange man lurking around the high school and asking “supposedly innocent questions.” As with any transition into young adulthood, the story also emphasizes “goodbye playdates, hello drugs, sex, and alcohol.”
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“Their principal’s office receives a severed finger in the mail,” Moriarty said of the start of the story. “In the first book, the parents at the school, they provide the Greek chorus explaining the action and what happened. In this book, the teenagers − the kids − are the Greek chorus. So they’re being interviewed about what happened. So the first thing that happens is they say, ‘Well, it all began at Madeline’s 50th birthday.’”
She said found it easy to pick back up with Madeline’s character. Dern’s Renata also features heavily in the sequel book, which Moriarty attributes to the actress and her work with the character in the TV show.
“It’s all Laura Dern’s fault because she was so amazing as Renata, it was impossible for me to not give her a bigger role also in this book,” Moriarty says. “You couldn’t put Renata in a corner.”
The creative team behind the television series didn’t have input on the sequel book, just as Moriarty will remain “very hands off” as Season 3 takes shape.
“I always said I only ever wanted to be an interested bystander,” Moriarty says.
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Star Witherspoon, who plays Madeline Mackenzie in the series in addition to executive producing, teased how Season 3 was coming together on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon shortly after Sloane’s recruitment was revealed. Just as the book takes place a decade later, the moms of the Monterey-set TV show will seemingly reunite close to 10 years following Season 2’s release in 2019.
“We might be working on Season 3,” she said on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “Yeah, I mean, they’re writing it. It’s exciting too, just to get the gang back together and have everybody start talking about it. It’s really fun.”