Authors Like Liane Moriarty: 10 Brutal Books on Female Friendship

Liane Moriarty listens to your conversations. She admitted it: “I’m definitely an eavesdropper. Oh god, some of the conversations you hear! And that comes from my mother.” Four of her novels have been made into television, and she was the first Australian author to put three books at number one on the New York Times list. All of that from a woman who listens in on strangers at restaurants (and blames her MOM for it!).

The reason I read authors like Liane Moriarty is personal. 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

Nobody sends a card, and most people treat it as a smaller loss than it is. That’s why we turn to female friendship thrillers; they make us think about the friends we’ve lost and how it really happened. Here are the authors like Liane Moriarty who write about friendships that fall apart:

How I Picked These Books

As a thriller author who lost her best friend over one bad trip to Bangkok, I’m picky about which books get to call themselves friendship thrillers. My criteria for this includes:

1. You get to know the friendship before it falls apart: The book spends real pages on why these women liked each other in the first place, not just on the betrayal. Emily and Kristen have taken the same trip every year since college. Jen and Riley have been best friends since kindergarten. If I don’t care about the friendship, I don’t care when it breaks, and then why am I even reading?!
2. Only a best friend could do this much damage: Whatever goes wrong only works because of how well they know each other. Beth has been running Addy for years. Kristen knows Emily will help her cover up a death, because Emily already did it once.
3. Nobody is all good or all bad: Moriarty never gives you a villain and a saint, and neither do these. Emily keeps choosing her friend. Barbara never once calls what she’s doing anything but friendship. There’s nothing more boring than a villain who is evil just because the plot needs one!

One heads-up before you start: three of these put sexual violence or coercion at the centre of the plot, and several others turn on a death. I put the content warning inside each entry, so you can skip a book if that’s not what you want tonight.

The 10 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. The tagline is "A backpacking trip has deadly consequences," which is putting it mildly. For readers who want to watch a woman keep defending her best friend long after she should have stopped.

I am legally obligated to tell you that the best friend in this book is named Kristen and she is the problem (RUDE!). Kirkus called it “a slow-burn thriller that gradually suffocates both the protagonist and the reader,” and meant that as praise. Reese Witherspoon picked it for her book club in August 2021, and Netflix announced a film that same year, with producers “currently searching for a writer and director.” I couldn’t find any news on it since.

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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 a cult thriller where the cult leader is your old friend.

They won’t let Audrey see Jessica until the retreat is over. 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 been optioned to become a movie.

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3. Catalina Margulis: Start With Again, Only More Like You (2025)

Carmen and Ally are best friends, and they are both about to turn 40. Carmen has the New York career and a house that looks like it belongs in a magazine. Then she gets a surprise pregnancy and loses her job, right as the crow’s feet show up. Ally is a marine biologist in Maine whose affair with her boss has just blown up, so she moves to Portland, Oregon, to start over. Their lives split apart, and then a tragedy brings up resentments they have both been holding onto. For readers whose best friend ended up with a completely different life than theirs.

Note: this is the only pick on the list that isn’t a thriller. I put it here because the story is about whether a best friendship can survive two lives going in different directions. #1 bestselling author Heather Marshall called it “a highly-relatable and cathartic story.”

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4. Megan Abbott: Start With Dare Me (2012)

Addy Hanlon has always been Beth Cassidy’s best friend and, 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 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 still remember exactly who ran their friend group in high school.

Chelsea Cain called it “Heathers meets Fight Club good” in the New York Times Book Review, which I think about constantly. Adam Sternbergh at Slate called it “a gripping murder mystery cloaked in a shrewd examination of female friendships.” Abbott spends less time on the murder than on Addy figuring out that Beth has been running her for years. Abbott went on to co-create the USA Network adaptation herself and showrun it. It premiered on December 29, 2019, and was canceled the following April, after one season.

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5. 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, and soon they’re having lunches and Sheba is inviting her 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. Content warning for the affair, which is on the page. For readers who like realizing, slowly, that they shouldn’t trust the narrator.

Americans will find this one shelved as What Was She Thinking?, which is a worse title. It was shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, which went to Vernon God Little. The 2006 film took four Academy Award nominations, for Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Philip Glass’s score and Patrick Marber’s screenplay, and it lost all four (ROBBED!). Variety described the film as “friendship that is really loneliness, and cruelty that is really sadness.” Barbara never once calls what she’s doing anything but friendship.

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6. Emma Cline: Start With The Girls (2016)

It’s Northern California at the violent end of the 1960s, and Evie Boyd is lonely and in a park when she sees a group of girls with 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 run by a man, and Evie doesn’t notice how close she’s getting to real violence because she’s 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.

Evie only ends up in that cult because Suzanne looked at her once. Jean Zimmerman wrote at NPR that “Cline homes in on the ways women observe each other and are in turn observed,” and closed her review with: “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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7. 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, and 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 ever wanted a work friend so badly they ignored the red flags.

Yes, this one is set in an office, but it’s on a friendship list on purpose, because what Nella wants most is a friend at work. Bethanne Patrick wrote at NPR 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 in the back half Harris turns it into a different genre entirely. It’s now a Hulu original series.

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8. 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 "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 their monstrous creations. After that, Samantha can’t tell what’s real anymore. 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 called it “a viciously funny bloodbath eviscerating the rarefied world of elite creative writing programs,” and also warned that the book is wickedly sharp and not altogether pleasant. Dwight Garner at the New York Times said “every time I open it up, I stumble upon a crackling sentence.” Bad Robot bought the film rights in March 2023, and it is still “currently being developed” (we’re waiting, Bad Robot!).

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9. 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.

You’d probably guess that Pride wrote Riley and Piazza wrote Jen, and so do a lot of readers. As the two authors put it: “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. It was Good Morning America’s book club pick for October 2021, and Booklist gave it a starred review calling it spellbinding from cover to cover.

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10. Jessica Knoll: Start With Luckiest Girl Alive (2015)

Ani FaNelli has the magazine job, the expensive clothes and the blue-blood fiance, and 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 figure out what being friends with the popular girls really cost her.

Publishers Weekly called it “one woman’s carefully orchestrated, perfect life slowly cracks to reveal a dark underbelly in Knoll’s knockout debut novel.” The reading group guide even 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 (OOF!). 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 when a friendship ends, nobody files anything. A friendship just 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.

Here’s how that plays out in three of these books. Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal never has to explain herself to anyone, because who questions a lonely teacher for wanting a friend? Emily in We Were Never Here helps cover up two deaths before she’ll admit her best friend is dangerous. 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.

And Moriarty is the one who took these stories to number one on the New York Times list. Big Little Lies, her best-known book, is "about female friendship, coercive control and retribution." In her newest one, the same friends are back ten years later with new headaches, traumas and secrets.

If you searched books like Liane Moriarty instead of authors like her, these ten are still your list.

What to Read Next

If you got to the bottom of this page still hungry, my list of books like Big Little Lies goes straight at Moriarty’s most famous book.

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. If you searched books like Liane Moriarty instead, those same picks are my answer. And if you want a friendship thriller you can finish tonight, Perfect Modern Wife at number two is a better pick than We Were Never Here or Dare Me, because it’s a novella about three old friends and a tradwife cult. As Goodreads reviewer Heather Flaherty put it, “I absolutely loved this novella and devoured it on one sitting.” And if you want a friendship novel that isn’t a thriller at all, Catalina Margulis’s Again, Only More Like You is the one.

What Should I Read First by Liane Moriarty Herself?

Big Little Lies, and not because of the show. It’s the book where the friendships ARE the plot, and Kirkus 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.

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. And one pick isn’t a thriller at all: Again, Only More Like You is about two best friends turning 40.

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’s the full list among the thrillers: 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 Perfect Modern Wife 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. Again, Only More Like You isn’t a thriller.

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