Authors Like Liane Moriarty: 9 Brutal Books on Female Friendship

Liane Moriarty listens to your conversations. She told Paul Daley at the Guardian where she got it: “I’m definitely an eavesdropper. Oh god, some of the conversations you hear! And that comes from my mother.” That is the whole engine. Four of her novels have been made into television, she was the first Australian author to put three books at number one on the New York Times list, and it all runs on a woman at the next table leaning slightly out of her chair.

I write thrillers and I came to them through comedy, which means I have spent a lot of years listening to rooms too. But the reason I read authors like Liane Moriarty is less professional than that. I flew to Bangkok to see my best friend Sarah, and I spent the trip complaining about harem pants and tourist traps and turning down every tuk-tuk on principle until I was, in my own words, dripping sweat from the heat and humidity. She pulled me aside and said I had changed. I said I have? She said yeah, you’re materialistic and judgy. I called a taxi, left, came back, packed, and slept on her sofa. Here is what I wrote about it in Chapter 9 of my memoir Where to Nest:

Losing her friendship is one of the biggest regrets in my life. We grieve the loss when people die, but what about when we drift apart from a friend? It hurts.

Where to Nest, Chapter 9

That’s why this shelf gets me and the marriage thrillers don’t. A marriage has paperwork. There is a document that ends it, a lawyer who bills for it, a day you can point at. A friendship has none of that, so when it goes you’re left holding a thing with no name and no ceremony, and everybody around you treats it as a smaller loss than it is. The nine books below are all built on that specific hole.

How I Picked These Books

I read authors like Liane Moriarty both because I love them and because I am trying to get better at writing women who have known each other for twenty years, so I read this shelf constantly and books about female friendship go faster than anything else I own. My criteria for this includes:

1. You have to have been in the friendship before it broke: The book has to spend real pages on why these two liked each other, not just on the betrayal. A stranger turning on you is a plot. A person who knows your childhood bedroom turning on you is a wound, and you only feel the difference if the writer showed you the bedroom first.
2. The knowing has to be the weapon: Whatever goes wrong has to be possible only because of how well they know each other. If the same damage could be done by a coworker who read her file, the friendship was decoration. I picked for books where the intimacy is the mechanism, so the dread builds out of things you already watched them share.
3. Nobody gets let off at the end: Moriarty never gives you a villain and a saint, and neither do these. The ending is where you find out whether a writer respects the women she built, so I weighed the last thirty pages hardest, because that is the part that keeps you thinking about your own phone and who is not in it anymore.

One heads-up before you start. This is a dark shelf. Three of these put sexual violence or coercion at the centre of the plot rather than in the background, and several others turn on a death. Every book that needs a content warning carries one inside its own entry, so you can steer around it if that’s not what you want tonight.

The 9 Best Authors Like Liane Moriarty (And Which Book to Start With)

1. Andrea Bartz — Start With We Were Never Here (2021)

Emily and Kristen have taken the same trip every year since college. This year, on the last night, Emily comes back to the hotel suite to find blood, broken glass, and a dead backpacker on the floor. Kristen says he attacked her. Emily helps her deal with it, the way she did last year, on a different trip, with a different backpacker. Content warning for two deaths and the cover-ups. Ballantine’s jacket copy puts it in one line: “A backpacking trip has deadly consequences.” For readers who want the whole book to be one long look at somebody’s face.

I am legally obligated to tell you that the best friend in this book is named Kristen and she is the problem. I have never felt so seen and so accused at the same time. Kirkus called it “a slow-burn thriller that gradually suffocates both the protagonist and the reader,” and meant that as praise. The suffocation is specifically that Emily keeps choosing her. Reese Witherspoon picked it for her book club in August 2021, Netflix announced a film that same year, and five years later I couldn’t find anything more recent than that Hollywood Reporter piece, which has producers “currently searching for a writer and director.”

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2. Kristen Van Nest — Start With Perfect Modern Wife (2025)

Audrey and McKinley used to be the kind of friends who drank too much tequila together. Now McKinley is one of the most famous tradwife influencers in the country, the face of a movement where women make everything from scratch and talk about how much they love being subservient to their husbands. When their mutual friend Jessica signs up for McKinley’s “Perfect Modern Wife” bootcamp, where women stay on her farm to learn how to attract a husband, Jessica disappears. Audrey drives out there to find her. For readers who want the friend group and the cult to be the same three women.

They won’t let Audrey see Jessica until the retreat is over. That’s the sentence the whole thing hangs on, and it’s the most realistic thing in the book, because it’s exactly how a friendship breakup works from the inside. You’re told there’s a reason, you’re told to wait, and the waiting is the answer. Laura Donovan, a Business Insider writer and author, called it Don’t Worry Darling meets Blink Twice, with one-liners that belong in a funny horror like Bodies Bodies Bodies. It’s fifty-three pages and it’s been optioned to become a movie. Full disclosure: I wrote this one.

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3. Megan Abbott — Start With Dare Me (2012)

Addy Hanlon has always been Beth Cassidy’s best friend and, in Little Brown’s own words, her “trusted lieutenant.” Beth calls the shots on the cheer squad and Addy carries them out, and that arrangement has worked for years. Then a young new coach arrives, Addy drifts into her orbit, and Beth starts what the jacket copy calls a subtle but vicious campaign to get her top-girl spot back. Then somebody dies and the police arrive. Content warning for a death investigated as a suicide. For readers who suspect high school was the last time the stakes were honest.

Chelsea Cain reviewed this in the New York Times Book Review and landed on “Heathers meets Fight Club good,” which I think about constantly. Abbott reproduces the line on her own site, which is where I read it. Adam Sternbergh at Slate, quoted in the publisher’s own praise list, called it “a gripping murder mystery cloaked in a shrewd examination of female friendships,” and the cloaking is the point: the murder is almost incidental to watching a teenager realize her best friend has been running her. Abbott went on to co-create the USA Network adaptation herself and showrun it. It premiered on December 29, 2019, and Deadline confirmed the cancellation the following April, one season in.

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4. Zoe Heller — Start With Notes on a Scandal (2003)

Barbara Covett is a schoolteacher who lives alone with her cat. When Sheba Hart joins the school as the new art teacher, Barbara senses the possibility of a friendship. Lunches. Invitations to family dinners. Then Sheba starts an affair with an underage student, it gets out, and Barbara decides to write an account in her friend’s defence. The content warning is the affair, and it is on the page. For readers who want the narrator to be the thing they should have been watching.

Americans will find this one shelved as What Was She Thinking?, which is a worse title and also the honest one. The Booker Prize Foundation’s own record of the 2003 prize lists it on the shortlist and names Vernon God Little as the winner. The 2006 film took four Academy Award nominations, for Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Philip Glass’s score and Patrick Marber’s screenplay, and a different film won every one of those four categories. Variety described the film as “friendship that is really loneliness, and cruelty that is really sadness,” and that is Barbara. She never once calls what she is doing anything but friendship.

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5. Emma Cline — Start With The Girls (2016)

Northern California, at the violent end of the 1960s. Evie Boyd is lonely and in a park when she sees a group of girls with what Random House calls a “dangerous aura of abandon.” One of them is Suzanne, older and magnetic, and Evie falls in thrall to her. Suzanne belongs to a cult, and the cult belongs to a man, and Evie does not notice how close she is getting to real violence because she is only ever looking at Suzanne. Content warning for the Manson-adjacent killings and for coercive sex inside the cult. For readers who remember wanting one specific girl to think they were interesting.

The thing Cline gets that almost nobody gets is that Evie isn’t there for the leader. She’s there because Suzanne looked at her once. Jean Zimmerman, reviewing it for NPR, wrote that “Cline homes in on the ways women observe each other and are in turn observed,” and then closed with a line I have quoted at people in bars: “Readers will down Cline’s spooky, twisted narrative in a gulp, and then they’ll go off to bed with the lights on.” It won the Shirley Jackson Award and spent three months on the New York Times list. Scott Rudin bought the film rights in 2014, before Random House had even acquired the book, and I couldn’t find a record of anything being released since.

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6. Zakiya Dalila Harris — Start With The Other Black Girl (2021)

Nella Rogers is an editorial assistant at Wagner Books and the only Black person in her department, which she has been handling alone until the day she smells her favourite brand of hair grease near her cubicle. Hazel-May McCall has been hired. Nella is thrilled. Then Hazel scoops her on a manuscript, starts taking long closed-door meetings with their shared boss, and Nella finds an anonymous note on her desk telling her to leave. For readers who have wanted somebody at work to be on their side so badly they stopped checking whether she was.

I put this on a friendship list on purpose, because the ache in it is a friendship ache even though the setting is an office. Bethanne Patrick wrote in her NPR review that Nella wants “someone to take coffee breaks with and maybe even learn and get promoted with, a true equal,” and that Hazel “doesn’t share Nella’s yearning for a close, supportive office pal.” Publishers Weekly called the book “dazzling, darkly humorous,” and then it does something in the back half that moves it out of the office-novel aisle entirely. Simon and Schuster’s page now leads its description of the book with the words “Now a Hulu Original Series.”

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7. Mona Awad — Start With Bunny (2019)

Samantha Heather Mackey could not be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program, and she is repelled by her cohort, a clique of rich girls who call each other Bunny and who, per Viking’s jacket copy, “seem to move and speak as one.” Then they invite her to something called Smut Salon. She goes, ditching her only real friend Ava to do it, and the Bunnies take her to the off-campus Workshop where they make the things the jacket copy calls their monstrous creations. The edges of reality go after that. For readers who want a clique story that turns into an actual horror novel.

This is the funniest book on the list and also the one most likely to make you put it down and walk around your apartment for a minute. Kirkus opened its review with “a viciously funny bloodbath eviscerating the rarefied world of elite creative writing programs.” Its verdict line, further down the same page, warns that the book is wickedly sharp and not altogether pleasant. Dwight Garner at the New York Times, quoted on Penguin Random House’s own praise page, said “every time I open it up, I stumble upon a crackling sentence.” Bad Robot bought the film rights in March 2023 and Penguin Random House’s own author bio still says it is “currently being developed,” which after three and a half years is its own small horror story.

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8. Christine Pride and Jo Piazza — Start With We Are Not Like Them (2021)

Jen and Riley have been best friends since kindergarten, and as adults they remain as close as sisters. Jen married young and is six months pregnant. Riley is about to become one of the first Black female anchors at the top news channel in Philadelphia. Then Jen’s husband, a city police officer, is involved in the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, and Riley is the one assigned to cover it. Content warning for the shooting, which is on the page. For readers who want the thing that breaks the friendship to be something neither woman did.

Everyone assumes Pride wrote Riley and Piazza wrote Jen, and the authors have gone out of their way to say that is not what happened. Their answer, given jointly in a Q and A: “A common misconception that readers have is that we split the writing along color lines; Jo writes the white characters and Christine, the Black ones. But that’s not our process.” Piazza has said she spent weeks writing only Riley’s chapters. Good Morning America announced it as its book club pick for October 2021, and Booklist gave it a starred review calling it spellbinding from cover to cover.

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9. Jessica Knoll — Start With Luckiest Girl Alive (2015)

Ani FaNelli has the magazine job, the expensive clothes and the blue-blood fiance, and by her publisher’s account she is this close to the perfect life she has worked for. All of it is built on what happened to her as a teenager at the Bradley School, and on what the girls she wanted to be friends with did and did not do about it. Content warning for sexual assault and for violence at the school. For readers who want to watch a woman audit the cost of having been popular-adjacent.

Publishers Weekly opened its review with “one woman’s carefully orchestrated, perfect life slowly cracks to reveal a dark underbelly in Knoll’s knockout debut novel.” What sat with me is Simon and Schuster’s own reading group guide, which asks readers to compare Ani’s friendships with Nell and Moni against Olivia and Hilary’s, and then asks flatly what sacrifices she was willing to make to keep the second pair. She adapted the book herself for the Netflix film starring Mila Kunis, which came out in October 2022.

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Why Do Female Friendship Thrillers Hurt More Than the Marriage Ones?

Because there’s no exit procedure. The Liane Moriarty books that stuck are never really about the husband. A marriage thriller can end in a courtroom or a lawyer’s office or a signature, and the genre has a hundred years of machinery for that. A friendship has no machinery at all. It has a text you didn’t answer, and then a birthday you let pass, and then a mutual acquaintance who mentions she’s doing well.

That gap is exactly where these nine books live. Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal never has to justify herself, because nobody polices what a friend is allowed to want. Emily in We Were Never Here helps cover up two deaths before she lets herself finish the sentence about what her best friend is. Nella in The Other Black Girl gets an anonymous note telling her to leave her job and still can’t bring herself to suspect the one person she was glad to see hired.

Moriarty is the writer who made this commercially enormous, and the Guardian, describing what it calls perhaps her most famous book, put the three ingredients in one line: Big Little Lies is “about female friendship, coercive control and retribution.” Kirkus files her newest one under Family Life and Friendship and opens its review by saying that ten years on, the friends from that book have new headaches, traumas and secrets.

If you came here searching books like Liane Moriarty rather than authors like her, that is the same shelf and these are the same nine. And the reason readers keep buying books about female friendship, I think, is that almost everybody has one. Not a dramatic one. A Sarah. Somebody who knew the version of you that existed before you got good at anything, who’s now a person you hear about secondhand.

What to Read Next

If you want one more after these, books like Big Little Lies is the closest neighbour to this list, it goes straight at the Moriarty shelf itself, and it is where I send people who came looking for authors like Liane Moriarty and got to the bottom of this page still hungry.

FAQ: Authors Like Liane Moriarty

Who Are the Best Authors Like Liane Moriarty?

If you’re hunting authors like Liane Moriarty, start with Andrea Bartz’s We Were Never Here, Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Emma Cline’s The Girls. After those, Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl, Mona Awad’s Bunny, Christine Pride and Jo Piazza’s We Are Not Like Them and Jessica Knoll’s Luckiest Girl Alive. Perfect Modern Wife, a tradwife-cult thriller about three friends, is on the list at number two. Full disclosure: I wrote that one. If you searched books like Liane Moriarty instead, those same picks are my answer.

What Should I Read First by Liane Moriarty Herself?

Big Little Lies, and not because of the show. It’s the book where the friend group is the structure rather than the setting, and Kirkus, reviewing it, credited her with invigorating the form “through wit, good humor, sharp insight into human nature and addictive storytelling.” After that, Truly Madly Guilty is the other clear friendship novel in her catalogue, following two best friends through a backyard barbecue that goes wrong, though that one drew more mixed reviews than usual for her, with Kirkus calling it not one of her best outings. Her newest is Big Little Truths, a direct sequel that returns to the same women ten years on. Read in order, those three are the Liane Moriarty books to start with.

Which Liane Moriarty Books Have Been Adapted for Television?

Four of them. Big Little Lies ran two seasons and fourteen episodes on HBO between February 2017 and July 2019, and a third season was confirmed in September 2025, with no episodes listed as having aired yet. Nine Perfect Strangers ran two seasons on Hulu, the first premiering in August 2021 and the second in May 2025. Apples Never Fall became a Peacock miniseries in 2024. The Last Anniversary ran six episodes on Binge in Australia between March and May 2025, with Nicole Kidman and Moriarty among its executive producers.

Which of These Books Are Actually Thrillers and Which Are Literary Fiction?

Straight thrillers: We Were Never Here, Dare Me and Luckiest Girl Alive. Literary novels that behave like thrillers: Notes on a Scandal, The Girls and We Are Not Like Them, all three of which withhold information the way a thriller does while getting shelved in general fiction. The Other Black Girl starts as a workplace novel and changes genre partway through, on purpose. Bunny is the outlier and nobody agrees on it: Penguin Random House files it under literary fiction and fairy tales, Publishers Weekly called it “darkly comedic,” and Kirkus said it may be the first entry into the canon of MFA horror.

Which One Should I Skip If I Don’t Want Sexual Violence on the Page?

Skip Luckiest Girl Alive and Notes on a Scandal. Knoll’s novel puts a teenage assault at the centre of the plot and doesn’t cut away from it, and Heller’s is built around a teacher’s affair with an underage student. The Girls has coercive sex inside a cult and doesn’t cut away either. That is the full list: the other six carry no sexual violence at all. We Were Never Here, Dare Me, Bunny, The Other Black Girl, We Are Not Like Them and my own novella at number two are clear on that front, though several of them are still rough going: We Are Not Like Them puts a police shooting of an unarmed Black teenager at its centre, Dare Me opens its investigation on a death, We Were Never Here turns on two more, and Bunny is a horror novel.

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