Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty | Free Audiobook
The school gate as a crime scene
It begins with a death nobody will explain and a school full of parents who all have a version of the story, and then it walks backwards through the year to find out how the body ended up where it did. The victim stays unnamed for a long time. So does the killer, although the reader is given more than enough evidence to start guessing, which is part of the pleasure.
Three women carry the book. Madeline is loud, funny, still furious about the husband who left her and now lives a few streets away with a wife who does yoga and forgives everybody. Celeste is the mother every other mother looks at twice, beautiful in a way that ends conversations, and privately paying for the life she appears to have. Jane is new in town, young enough that somebody asks whether she is the nanny, with a son nobody can quite place and a sadness that arrived long before the move.
What binds them is a small vicious thing at the kindergarten orientation, a child accused of hurting another child, and the way a community decides who to believe. From there, the little lies accumulate: the ones the women tell each other, the ones they tell themselves, and the one that ends in a death. Fifteen hours and fifty-five minutes.
There is a particular courage in taking domestic violence and putting it inside a book with a bright cover and jokes about yoga wives, and I think that gamble is exactly why this one conquered the world. What impressed me most was the structure: the story keeps cutting back to a police interview after the trivia night, so you are reading a whodunit while being told, over and over, that the answer is not the point. The mothers are.
And Moriarty makes you like them, which is harder than it sounds. Madeline's fury is written as comedy and lands as loyalty; Jane's awkwardness is written as comedy and lands as damage; Celeste's perfection is written as comedy and then quietly taken apart. I have read the criticism over the years that the book's tone is too light for its subject, and I want to take it seriously, because a reviewer I read put the best version of it: there are moments where the novel comes across as a bit frothy in that very suburban, ladies-who-lunch sort of way. That is a fair description of a few chapters. I would only add what that same reviewer added, that the froth is not a failure of nerve, it is the social texture the book is exposing, and the violence in the middle of it is all the more shocking for arriving inside a beach read.
On audio, Caroline Lee is one of the reasons this works so well in the format. She has narrated a lot of Moriarty and it shows: the switching between the three women is clean enough that you never need to be told who is speaking, the comedy has timing rather than volume, and she never overplays the darkness when the book finally stops joking. Fifteen hours and fifty-five minutes is a long weekend of listening and it moves faster than that.
Worth knowing before you start: this is the first of two, and the sequel, Big Little Truths, is already on the site. If you would rather meet Moriarty on a book that is not a murder story at all, Here One Moment is the more recent one and it is very good.
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty opens with a death at a school trivia night and then works backwards through the year to explain it, with three mothers at the centre: Madeline, who forgives nobody; Celeste, who looks perfect and is not; and Jane, who has just arrived in town with a son nobody can place.
It runs 15 hrs and 55 mins, narrated by Caroline Lee, who has read several of Moriarty's novels and handles all three women without ever making you check who is speaking. You can start it on a free trial, cancellable whenever you like, and you spend that trial on whichever title you want, this one included.
The book you claim with the trial stays in your library even after you cancel, so the whole fifteen hours are yours to keep. That matters here more than usual: the sequel is already out, and the ending of this one is built to send you straight into it.
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