2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist: Best Fiction
Best of 2018: People, Publishers Weekly, Glamour, Real Simple, PopSugar, Kobo, LitHub
Best of Fall: Goodreads, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Elle, USA Today, Harper’s Bazaar, AARP, CrimeReads, BookRiot, PureWow, InStyle, Bustle, and Refinery29
“A treat for Big Little Lies fans....Witty and poignant, Moriarty’s storytelling is worth every penny.” —People, Book of the Week
“[A] smart and suspenseful page-turner.” —Woman’s World
“An entrancing read…An early holiday present for Moriarty fans, Nine Perfect Strangers is a darkly comical novel that defies classification. It manages to be wildly funny and richly emotional at the same time, proving that the Big Little Lies author still has a lot to offer her readers.” —Bustle
“As she did in Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty writes compelling, realistic characters. Readers will devour Nine Perfect Strangers.” —Real Simple
“Moriarty is back with another page-turner.” —TIME
“Irresistible.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Liane Moriarty is a master of sustained tension.” —Washington Post
“Promises to be a lively page-turner.” —Vogue
“A cannily plotted, continually surprising, and frequently funny page-turner and a deeply satisfying thriller. Moriarty delivers yet another surefire winner.” —Publishers Weekly, starred and boxed review
“Liane Moriarty serves up laughs, thrills, surprises.” —Associated Press
“Each reveal is a delicious surprise…Nine Perfect Strangers is so well written and slyly constructed that it won’t feel like enough.” —Booklist
“This latest work from the author of Big Little Lies makes us cower, laugh, reflect, cry, and fall in love right alongside the characters.” —Family Circle
“Can’t wait for Season 2 of Big Little Lies? Satisfy your craving with Moriarty’s new novel. At a remote health resort, nine people gather, eager for change. Despite the luxurious new-age comforts that surround them, each realizes that the next 10 days will be tougher than they could ever imagine. Things may not be what they seem in this addictive read.” —Observer
“The wildly popular Big Little Lies author is back with another irresistible story that’s both suspenseful and surprisingly funny.” —AARP’s The Girlfriend
“No one writes about the minutiae of women’s lives with quite as much insight and pull as Moriarty, who wrote Big Little Lies, and yet again her slow-burning plotting leaves you gasping at the very end. I’m jealous of anyone who hasn’t read this yet.” —Grazia (UK)
“Liane Moriarty is simply unparalleled at infusing flawed characters with humor and heartbreak. Her singular brand of storytelling was most recently showcased when her bestselling novel Big Little Lies was made into an Emmy-winning HBO miniseries. Nine Perfect Strangers is a worthy follow-up, offering an irresistible take on our wellness-obsessed culture, where the weirder the treatment, the better.” —BookPage
“Nine Perfect Strangers has everything I look for in a Moriarty novel: colorful, relatable characters and a page-turning narrative infused with humor and warmth…a wise, wonderfully immersive read.” —Augusta Chronicle
“Readers and movie stars alike cannot get enough of Moriarty and her addictive novels, which explore the secrets of suburbia with wit, empathy, and enough plot twists to have Alfred Hitchcock applauding from the grave.” —San Diego Union-Tribune
“Liane Moriarty is a serious talent...[She] paints a picture with color, sound, aroma, mood, and fragments of the characters’ inner monologues, telling us their stories in quick details while the transformation goes off the rails.” —News & Observer
“Liane Moriarty seamlessly leads the reader through an unpredictable maze of struggles with love, loss, and understanding. Her pacing, character development, and knack for packing a surprise punch will keep readers engaging in literary therapy by turning the pages late into the night.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Praise for Liane Moriarty’s Novels:
“Funny and scary.” —Stephen King
“Sharply intelligent.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Irresistible.” —People
“Simply exquisite.” —Bookreporter
“Powerful.” —The Washington Post
“Brilliant.” —Sophie Hannah
“Gob-smacking.” —BookPage
“Superb.” —Parade
“Spellbinding.” —Emily Giffin
“Gripping.” —Oprah.com
“A wonderful writer.” —Anne Lamott
“Like drinking a pink cosmo laced with arsenic.” —USA Today
“Mesmerizing.” —Family Circle
“So, so good.”—Jojo Moyes
“The ferocity that Ms. Moriarty brings…is shocking.” —New York Times
2018-11-15
Nine people gather at a luxurious health resort in the Australian bushland. Will they have sex, fall in love, get killed, or maybe just lose weight?
Moriarty (Truly Madly Guilty, 2014, etc.) is known for darkly humorous novels set in the suburbs of Sydney—though her most famous book, Big Little Lies (2014), has been transported to Monterey, California, by Reese Witherspoon's HBO series. Her new novel moves away from the lives of prosperous parents to introduce a more eclectic group of people who've signed up for a 10-day retreat at Tranquillium House, a remote spa run by the messianic Masha, "an extraordinary-looking woman. A supermodel. An Olympic athlete. At least six feet tall, with corpse-like white skin and green eyes so striking and huge they were almost alien-like." This was the moment when the guests should probably have fled, but they all decided to stay (perhaps because their hefty payments were nonrefundable?). The book's title is slightly misleading, since not all the guests are strangers to each other. There are two family groups: Ben and Jessica Chandler, a young couple whose relationship broke down after they won the lottery, and the Marconis, Napolean and Heather and their 20-year-old daughter, Zoe, who are trying to recover after the death of Zoe's twin brother, Zach. Carmel Schneider is a divorced housewife who wants to get her mojo back, Lars Lee is an abnormally handsome divorce lawyer who's addicted to spas, and Tony Hogburn is a former professional footballer who wants to get back into shape. Though all these people have their own chapters, the main character is Frances Welty, a romance writer who needs a pick-me-up after having had her latest novel rejected and having been taken in by an internet scam—she fell in love with a man she met on Facebook and sent money to help his (nonexistent) son, who'd been in a (nonexistent) car accident. How humiliating for a writer to fall for a fictional person, Frances thinks, in her characteristically wry way. When the guests arrive, they're given blood tests (why?) and told they're going to start off with a five-day "noble silence" in which they're not even supposed to make eye contact with each other. As you can imagine, something fishy is going on, and while Moriarty displays her usual humor and Frances in particular is an appealing character, it's all a bit ridiculous.
Fun to read, as always with Moriarty's books, but try not to think about it or it will stop making sense.
