Spending hours on an airport tarmac, stuck on a delayed flight, inspired Liane Moriarty’s new novel. Looking around, she wondered how her fellow passengers would meet their end: will you be the one who has an unexpectedly early death? Will you be the one who lives to 100?

Called Here One Moment, the novel’s premise can’t be revealed without spoilers, but it interrogates how to live a good life, fate and free will. It’s told from various people’s perspectives, part of what makes Moriarty’s novels ripe for adaptation.

In exciting news for fans, she told this masthead that she is working on a sequel to the enormously popular Big Little Lies, which was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning series for HBO starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon.

“It’s the first of my books where I think, actually that does make sense, I could write a sequel,” she says. “There does seem to be a desire for a possible new season – not that I’m confirming a new season.

“In the first one, the children are all starting school, which is what my children were doing at the time that I wrote it and now my children are teenagers. I’m very interested in stories involving parenting teens.”

As Moriarty prepares to tour the country to talk about Here One Moment, she reflects on its genesis on that plane. “I had mortality on my mind as I sat there on that flight,” she says.

Stuck in her thoughts after a week spent alone writing, she got thinking about death. “What blew my mind was the fact that at some point in the future that information would be available, that we would know exactly how and when each of us had died, including myself.”

Released on Thursday, the best-selling author’s latest book explores fate and destiny, ideas that hit close to home after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2021 (her sister was treated for it a few years before), her father’s death and the pandemic.