Book of the Day

From the review

Celeste can't tell whether her mother-in-law, Mary Louise, is simply getting older or whether something else is setting in. It's a small worry tucked inside a louder one. A threatening package turns up at the local high school, and word spreads fast through this corner of Australia. Ten years on from Big Little Lies, Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata, and Bonnie aren't refereeing five-year-olds' birthday parties anymore. Their kids are teenagers now, so the stakes have shifted from invitations to the real thing: drinking, sex, and a stranger loitering near the school gates asking questions that sound harmless and aren't. Moriarty rotates through all five women in turn, and stacking their chapters against each other is where the book does its best work. You see how the same decade landed so differently on each of them. Madeline is up against the hardest stretch of her life, and Moriarty handles it with more restraint than the setup promises. Jane has hit a real fork in her marriage. Bonnie has learned yoga only goes so far. Renata, delightfully, is thriving out of pure spite, and she is the funniest thing in the novel by a wide margin.