Big little stories

Big Little Lies author Liane Moriarty is one of Australia's most successful writers. But she still starts a new book wondering whether she can pull it off.

- SALLY BLUNDELL

Liane Moriarty's first book was about a band of smugglers, smuggling, er, something.

"I don't know what they were smuggling. I don't know if I had any idea what smuggling was. It was mostly taken from Enid Blyton," says the internationally bestselling Australian author. "But there was a little girl called Serene, Serry for short. I can remember creating that character and I can still feel her as one of my characters - that little girl, I feel I know her."

Liane - pronounced "Lee-ahn" Moriarty was 10 when her father commissioned her first story with a $1 advance. Now, 45 years after that effort, titled "The Mystery of Dead Man's Island", her books have topped international bestseller lists, clocked up more than 22 million sales and inspired two TV series (with more to come).

Her ninth book, Apples Never Fall, is on course to follow the same stellar trajectory, with a massive 750,000 first print run and a screenplay in the writing. It tells the story of four adult siblings - Troy, Logan, Amy, and Brooke - thrown into varying levels of anxiety when their mother, Joy Delaney, goes missing. Was she killed by her husband, Stan? Or does it have something to do with Savannah, the self-proclaimed victim of domestic violence who arrived late one night at Joy and Stan's door and stayed on?

In the early stages of writing the book, Moriarty was as mystified as the four siblings.

"The only thing I knew was that Joy would go missing and people would think Stan may have murdered her," she says from her home in Sydney. "I didn't know if he was guilty or innocent."