My Readers Guide for Big Little Truths discusses this exciting sequel to the 2014 bestselling book by Liane Moriarty that was adapted for HBO. My post has a character list, plot summary and discussion questions.
Readers Guide for Big Little Truths
Liane Moriarty is clear in her author’s note: this the sequel to the Big Little Lies novel, not the HBO show.
Madeline’s son Fred exists in this universe and Madeline never cheated on Ed. But for this sequel Liane Moriarty says she included two things from the HBO adaptation: Mary-Louise, Perry’s mother; and making Renata a more major character.
The story picks up roughly ten years after the events of the first book. The Pirriwee kids are now fifteen and sixteen, and the death of Perry in book one is an event that several characters are still unmoored by.
The novel contains two timelines: short flash-forward chapters set entirely on “D-Day,” and a longer thread covering the weeks and months leading up to it.
D-Day is both the day a human finger is mailed to Pirriwee High School and the day of the school’s History Showcase, the screening of short documentaries that the kids have been working on all term.
Characters in Big Little Truths
The Mackenzie Household
Madeline Martha Mackenzie celebrates turning fifty in the beginning of the book. She now works in event planning at the Pirriwee Pacific Hotel. She’s still married to Ed, having NOT cheated on him! Abigail is Madeline’s twenty-five year-old daughter (with Madeline’s ex, Nathan) who is dating Luka. Chloe is Madeline and Ed’s fifteen-year-old daughter. Fred is Madeline and Ed’s older child, and he is attending college in the U.S. Paul is Madeline’s brother. Madeline’s mother also shows up to attend her daughter’s birthday party.
Jane’s Household
Jane married Tom, the barista turned café owner from book one. Ziggy is Jane’s son; his biological father is “Saxon Banks,” (Perry) the man revealed in book one to have assaulted Jane.
Celeste’s Household
Celeste is Perry’s widow. Max and Josh are her twin sons with Perry, now teenagers. Mary-Louise is Perry’s mother (an addition from the TV show!)
Marco is new in town, initially suspected of being a creeper (the “man in the green car.”) He has a daughter, Betty,
Bonnie’s Household
Bonnie,is still married to Nathan. Their daughter, Skye, learns for the first time during this book that her mother caused Max and Josh’s father’s death.
Renata’s Household
Renata‘s mother dies partway through the book. Her daughter, Amabella, resurfaces an old grudge against Ziggy over kindergarten-era bullying by Max. Jackson, Renata’s son, is “traveling” and not in this book.
Staff at Pirriwee High
Dr. Seawright is the school principal. Lottie Wang is his administrator and executive assistant, and the unfortunte person who opens a box with a human finger inside. Anna Kennard is the head of science and Melody Montclair is the new history teacher.
Plot Summary for Big Little Truths
Prologue: D-Day
The book opens at Blue Blues, the beach café that was the neighborhood social hub in book one. Six teenagers are hanging out there. Meanwhile, at the school office, Lottie Wang, the principal’s administrator and executive assistant, opens a delivery and finds a severed human finger inside. The rest of the book loops back around to this day.
Madeline Turns Fifty
Madeline is dreading her fiftieth birthday. She’s now working in event planning at the Pirriwee Pacific Hotel, and turning fifty is hitting her harder than she expected.
Jane married Tom, the Blue Blues barista from book one who now runs the coffee shop. Her son Ziggy reluctantly considers Celeste’s twins, Max and Josh, his brothers, and Ziggy has a relationship with Mary-Louise, Perry’s mother.
The kids report that they started out in separate friend groups at school: the twins are the sporty ones, Chloe is popular, Skye is the nerdy one. But the History Showcase and the events of the book pull the whole group back together again.
Celeste reflects on how much therapy the twins needed after Perry’s death, though they seem to be doing fine now. She still misses Perry in a complicated way. When Mary-Louise pops up for a visit Madeline agrees, Mary-Louise can come to her birthday party.
Right before her party, Madeline finds a lump in her breast. Around the same time, Jane finds a mini bottle stashed in Ziggy’s room. She’s worried about this and the fact that she thinks Tom longs for a new baby.
Flashforward, D-Day: DCI Adrian Quinlan arrives at the high school to investigate the finger. On the drive over, he thinks back to Bonnie’s case (Perry’s death) and wonders if the finger could have anything to do with Bruce Tortinas, a gangster-adjacent local who recently bought a house in the neighborhood.
The Birthday Party and Its Aftershocks
A lot happens at Madeline’s party. Abigail’s boyfriend Luka proposes. As the teens reunite at the party, Skye learns for the first time that her mother, Bonnie, was responsible for the death of Max and Josh’s father. Ziggy also learns the full, ugly truth about his conception story and comes out badly shaken by the revelation. Max and Josh discuss a creepy guy who parks outside the school in a green car.
Madeline feels unsettled by Abigail’s engagement, and then the party is interrupted by a more urgent problem: her mother fell that morning, was unable to get up, and didn’t make it to the party. No-one noticed!
Flashforward, D-Day: Quinlan still has no leads on whose finger it is.
Diagnoses and Distractions
Madeline’s mother is in rehab after her fall. Melody Montclair, the new history teacher, starts showing up at Beach Boot Camp, led by instructor Brody. Meanwhile, Ziggy is still angry and withdrawn, and Josh has started avoiding school altogether.
Melody arranges a medical appointment for Madeline’s lump, which turns out to be a benign cyst. But Ed tells her he waited until after her birthday to drop his own bombshell: he recently received a lymphoma diagnosis.
Flashforward, D-Day: The finger’s packaging turns out to have Melody’s name on it.
Tue Women Worry
The women rally around Madeline as her mother enters rehab and Ed starts cancer treatment. While cleaning out Madeline’s fridge, Bonnie and Jane watch Amabella, Chloe, and Skye arrive at the house, vaping. When Jane goes looking through Ziggy’s room for vapes, she discovers he isn’t just using them, he’s selling them. Ziggy is furious about the invasion of privacy.
At a parenting lecture at the town library, Celeste notices an attractive guy. They chat but don’t exchange names. At Jane and Tom’s anniversary dinner, Melody shows up with her husband, Seth, Tom brings up wanting a baby again, and Jane has a weird flashback to the obstetrician who delivered Ziggy.
Perry’s sister calls Celeste, worried about dementia symptoms she has noticed in Mary-Louise. For her part, Mary-Louise insists that Bonnie owes her an apology. Bonnie frets that Skye is angry at her for telling all the mothers about the vaping.
Flashforward, D-Day: Quinlan asks Dr. Seawright, the principal, whether he’s having an affair with Melody.
Weddings, Wills, and Warning Signs
Madeline has severely frayed nerves from juggling work stress, Ed’s treatment, and Abigail’s wedding planning. A client cancels her wedding and, when Madeline won’t refund her deposit, snaps “do you know who my father is?” (Her father, it turns out, is Bruce Tortinas, the man that Quinlan suspects may have something to do with the finger.)
On the drive to the Renata’s mother’s funeral, the women’s conversation drifts to the Madeline’s showdown with the daughter of Bruce Tortinas.
After the funeral, Renata cries for a long time, which sets Jane off crying too, over the pressure she’s under about having another baby. A tearful Bonnie can’t get over the vaping, incident and Madeline can’t believe they are being so petty when Ed’s treatment is not going well.
Flashforward, D-Day: Quinlan can’t eliminate Bruce Tortinas as a suspect, because Tortinas is out of the country on a cruise.
The Green Car Guy Has a Name
At Amabella’s sixteenth birthday party, Celeste picks up a group of drunk teenagers, including Josh, who confesses he’s in love with Skye. Madeline and Ed talk over the Tortinas situation and whether Bruce will come after Madeline. Chloe feels frozen out of her cool kids friend group.
Flashforward, D-Day: Quinlan still hasn’t tracked down Melody to ask her why someone might have mailed her a finger.
Jane and Melody spend time together at Brodie’s art fair and later at a nightclub, where Jane finds herself imagining kissing Melody. Celeste explores her own attraction, to Marco, the man from the lecture, whom she’s agreed to see again. The mothers speculate about whether Melody and Seth have an open marriage, and whether Melody was flirting with Jane.
Flashforward, D-Day: Quinlan finally reaches Melody, and asks her directly whether she can think of anyone who’d want to hurt her.
Melody’s Circle Widens
Nathan tells Madeline that Chloe has been helping Melody with a research project, and Chloe mentions that Melody’s husband Seth told her he’s illiterate and needs help learning to read.
Riding in the car together, Nathan and Madeline notice spot the same ugly green car they’d assumed belonged to a predator, right before Abigail calls to say her wedding is off.
Melody starts turning up at Celeste’s house regularly. Mary-Louise has a dizzy spell and needs Celeste to pick her up.
Tom’s mother hears about Jane and Tom’s baby standoff and bluntly Jane whether she has considered letting Tom go. Celeste introduces Marco to Mary-Louise, who approves of him.
On Celeste’s first date with Marco, the school calls to say that the twins need to be picked up for participating in a protest, along with Ziggy and the other kids.
The protest turns out to be a reaction to a tone-deaf email from Dr. Seawright, warning parents to watch out for a “creepy guy” hanging around campus while also suggesting the girls’ uniform skirts were too short and enticing. The kids, furious by his victim-blaming, staged a protest around the school fountain.
Melody and Marco, Converging
The mothers take a girls’ night away in the Blue Mountains, with Melody tagsging along. Talk turns frankly to sex. Meanwhile, the kids spot Marco at the beach while working on their still-mysterious history showcase project.
Renata, it emerges, is sleeping with Brodie, the BBC instructor. Bonnie remains fixated on the idea that Skye is angry with her.
Celeste sees Marco again, and he makes a confession: his daughter, Betty, became unsettlingly close with Melody, and that closeness is the reason he moved to town in the first place. Marco is the man in the green car. He isn’t a predator, as the kids’ rumor mill has assumed. He’s a worried father who has been watching Melody.
Tom ask Jane, who is helping out at the café, whether she has a crush on Melody, and turns the question back on him: does he want to go have a baby with someone else?
Celeste tells Marco she can’t see him anymore, now that he’s admitted the real reason he moved to Sydney.
Madeline pays a visit to the Tortinas house to apologize for the wedding-deposit blowup (Bruce, back from his cruise, couldn’t care less).
D-Day: The History Showcase
From here, all the timelines converge.
It’s the day of the history showcase. Chloe doesn’t want Madeline to come, seemingly out of embarrassment over being frozen out by her popular friends. But is there another reason??
Quinlan is following a lead in the finger case to the home of a man named Ewan Drew, only to learn Drew is already dead. Celeste tells Mary-Louise that things with Marco are over, and the two of them head to the showcase.
At the event, Madeline and Ed watch Melody take the stage dressed as Marie Antoinette. The showcase, titled “Misunderstood Historical Figures: Villains or Heroes,” is a collection of ten short student documentaries.
Surprise addition to the Film Festival
Ziggy comes up to introduce his own film and announces, to visible surprise, that he changed his topic. His documentary isn’t about a historical figure at all. It’s about Melody, and one of his interviewees is Marco’s daughter, Betty.
The girls interviewed in the film, including Betty, tell disturbing and consistent stories. Melody has been procuring teenage girls for her husband Seth. In her role as a teacher, she charms and befriends the mothers while grooming their daughters.
Someone cuts the film off mid-screening. Dr. Seawright panics. Melody vanishes from the room.
Outside, Marco and Betty explain themselves to Celeste: Betty wanted to be there in person when Melody was finally exposed. Betty describes a pattern: Melody and Seth have done this before, and whenever people start to catch on, they simply move to a new town and start over.
The Aftermath of the Screening
Mary-Louise, for her part, seems genuinely confused by what the documentary was even about. Does she really have dementia? Bonnie finally has a conversation with Mary-Louise, in which she apologizes, and ends up wading into the school fountain.
Madeline and Ed press Chloe for what she knows about the documentary. The mothers, as a group, decide to show up at Melody’s door. When Melody answers, Madeline lunges at her. Melody’s response is to insist it’s all a big misunderstanding.
Back home, Chloe tells Madeline that Ed is acting strange, hunting for the name of a police officer he and Madeline once met at a party.
Who sent the finger??
At the police station, a woman named Clara Long confesses to sending the finger. She now works at a crematorium but was one of Melody’s former students. According to Clara, Seth pulled his “I’m illiterate, please teach me to read” routine on her too.
So Clara cut off the finger of Ewan Drew, whose body arrived at her crematorium for cremation, and mailed it to the school with a handwritten label. Her intent? To “point the finger” at Melody.
The Parents Absorb the News
At the hospital, Madeline learns Ed has been sectioned. His cancer treatment triggered steroid toxicity, causing a psychiatric crisis.
A shocked Jane asks Ziggy why he never told her what he knew about Melody, and he says simply that Melody was Jane’s friend and he thinks his mom would have defended her.
DCI Quinlan returns to the school to investigate the documentary fallout, only to be interrupted by news that Melody and Seth have been in a car accident. Seth is in critical condition. Melody has suffered an “internal decapitation,” an injury that’s ironic given she was dressed as Marie Antoinette a few hours earlier.
Ever the cat with nine lives, Melody recovers and emails Jane, telling her not to worry: it was all a misunderstanding.
Chloe reveals to Madeline that she had sex with Seth. She was fifteen at the time. She frames the encounter as consensual, but it is clearly the same kind of predation others accused Melody and Seth of.
Mary-Louise claims that her “dementia” symptoms, were caused by allergy medication Skye reports that Bonnie also seems to be doing better. Marco and Celeste, once the truth about his reasons for moving to town have cleared his name, are dating again.
Chloe is left conflicted that Melody and Seth haven’t faced any real consequences yet.
In the book’s final chapter, Mary Louise is driving to the airport to pick someone up, only to realize that she can’t remember who she is collecting or why. Confused and clearly not as recovered as she seemed, she turns the car around, and in doing so runs Melody and Seth’s car off the road, then keeps driving.
The Happily Ever After?
Ed finishes his cancer treatment, which appears to have been successful. Abigail and her fiancé get back together, and it seems she might be pregnant. Celeste and Marco are a tentative couple. Bonnie and Mary Louise have reached something like peace. Ziggy and Skye are still together. Luka bought a puppy for Ed. Fred arrives home to see his dad.
Grab My FREE Discussion Questions
Big Little Truths finally answers the question everyone had after Big Little Lies: what happens to Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Bonnie, Renata, and their kids ten years after the dramatic events of the book?
My free printable discussion guide is ready to download. Thirteen questions help you dig into what’s changed for these women since Trivia Night, and what hasn’t: the aging and caregiving storylines, the kids finally learning the truth about their own childhoods, and some eerie karmic parallels.