You try to hide things, bend the truth, avoid situations where you’ll need to talk too much. This is your school uniform, something you wear to fit in.

The kids have it pretty easy.

Liane Moriarty’s come out of her first school year unscathed, she says. Her son George, six, is now in year one and her daughter Anna, four, heads to big school next year, and her experience of it all has been an “absolute pleasure”, but it was this sense of community that she found in the schoolyard that partly inspired her latest novel Big Little Lies.

Pirriwee Public is ready for the new school year. The book opens six months down the track; something terrible has happened at the Elvis and Audrey trivia night, and Moriarty takes the reader back to orientation day to lay down the clues.

It’s a dark little story, full of suburban secrets, some little, some big, some incredibly damaging. And what makes it so real is that it’s full of people you know - people just like the ones you stand around the school gate with at 3pm five days a week.

Moriarty made it clear to the people she does that with in her northern Sydney suburb that they were not in this book. “The kindergarten teacher’s dimples were, that’s about it.

“But it’s a little community and in any little community there’s a potential for conflict,” she says.

“And when it’s married with this fierce overprotective feeling you have for your children you can see how it could all go wrong.”

Following on from her 2013 novel The Husband’s Secret, where a family is torn apart by a shocking confession, Moriarty began to think more about what people were actually capable of - “from the little acts of evil right through to the big acts of evil.”

The Husband’s Secret was a runaway success. It was the fourth best-selling novel on Amazon in 2013, hit the top of the New York Times best-seller list within weeks of publication and has remained on the list for more than 40 weeks. It sold more than a million copies in the United States and was snapped up by publishers worldwide to be translated into 35 languages. CBS Films have optioned the film rights.

Big Little Lies has the potential do the same thing, perhaps even more, for it’s a much meatier story, touching on issues such as domestic violence, lone parenting, step parenting, bullying and stereotyping. Yet within all this, there’s a vein of laugh-out-loud humour.

“My American editor sent me an email about the darker turn I’d taken in The Husband’s Secret and how that had worked and basically she was saying do that again - but don’t forget the humour in this one.

“I remember getting an email from a reader after The Husband’s Secret who said, ‘You used to be funny, what’s happened? I hope you perk up soon.’ I think I have!”

Moriarty, 47, can see how her books come out of where her life is at a certain point, but she doesn’t see that as a bad thing. Her readers, if the letters they send are any indication, are also experiencing the similar things.

“A lot of them are people I would be friends with,” she says. “Being a parent is universal and it’s nice to know that you’re not the only one dealing with such issues and relationships.”

She jokes that now she has a winning formula she might stick with it, ending up with a murder at the retirement village bridge tournament, before she shuts down the computer and stops writing.

Let's hope there's plenty of writing before we get to that point.

Big Little Lies, by Liane Moriarty (Macmillan, $32.99)