The Hypnotist’s Love Story

The Hypnotist’s Love Story is Liane Moriarty’s fifth novel, published in 2011 before Big Little Lies turned her into one of the biggest names in contemporary fiction. The setup is pure Moriarty. Ellen O’Farrell is a hypnotherapist living in a beachside Sydney suburb, finally happy in a new relationship with Patrick. Patrick has one piece of news to share with her on their fourth date that he was not sure how to bring up. He has a stalker. His ex girlfriend Saskia has been following him for the past three years, and there is no end to it in sight.

What makes the novel interesting is that Moriarty does not write Saskia as a flat villain. The book alternates between Ellen’s third person narration and Saskia’s first person interior monologue, and the reader gets to know Saskia from the inside. She is grieving, she is unwell, and she is also a real person whose obsession comes from a place readers will recognize even if they would never act on it themselves. The triangle that develops between the three of them is more morally complicated than the early chapters suggest.

Moriarty’s strengths are all here. The dry observational humor that makes her dialogue snap. The Sydney suburban setting rendered with the specificity that makes it feel like a real place rather than a generic backdrop. The willingness to take her female characters seriously without flattening them into either heroines or types. The novel is shorter than Big Little Lies and the stakes are lower, but the emotional intelligence is just as sharp.

For readers who came to Moriarty through the HBO adaptations of Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, this earlier novel is a satisfying way to read backward through her catalogue. For new readers, the prose is accessible, the pacing is brisk, and the central romance has a quirky charm that her later books sometimes set aside in favor of higher drama.