Die Spiegel review

Strange Sally Diamond has been reviewed in Germany’s Die Spiegel. We have a translation featured below.

Scroll down for a translation.

Die Spiegel - June 19th 2024

Hollywood star and literary influencer Reese Witherspoon doesn't like novels that are too dark: "You'd be shocked if you knew how many books depict women being chained up in basements. I know that there are such things in the world. But I don't feel like reading a book about it," she told the New York Times.

That's a shame. For Witherspoon, because she will probably never read Liz Nugent's terrific new psychological thriller "Strange Sally Diamond." And for Nugent, because a positive mention in Reese's Book Club is something of a bestseller guarantee.

Nugent, who is extremely successful in Ireland but more of an insider tip in the rest of the world, deserves the attention. Because she tackles the sensitive subject of "captive women (kept as sex slaves)" without voyeurism and sensationalism and maintains a narrative balance between heartbreaking and wickedly funny.

How Nugent finds the funny in the deadly serious is already apparent at the beginning of the novel: Sally Diamond, the first-person narrator, tries to burn her recently deceased father in a fire barrel behind the house. She has taken literally what he always told her in jest: "When I die, you can just throw me away with the garbage."

Memories of Fritzl

Sally, we gradually learn, does not understand irony or how other people feel and why they do what they do. This sometimes leads to grotesque misunderstandings, but has a dark background. Because Sally was born in captivity.

Her mother Denise was kidnapped as a child by the dentist Conor Geary and kept as a sex slave in a barn for 24 years - it is impossible not to remember the case of the Austrian Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter in the basement for more than two decades, repeatedly raped her and fathered seven children with her.

When Denise and Sally are finally freed, Sally is six years old and, like her mother, severely traumatized. Denise kills herself shortly afterwards, and Sally grows up with the psychiatrist couple Thomas and Jean Diamond in isolation on the outskirts of an Irish village. After the death of both of her adoptive parents, she has to find her way in life step by step. The 43-year-old with the mind of a disturbed child learns to accept help, she tries to understand how the people around her function, she finds trust and friends. And she largely gets her (auto-)aggression under control.

A double martyrdom

What Sally doesn't know: she has an older brother, Peter. From his perspective, Nugent tells the second and much darker strand of the novel in parallel. Peter's story casts a shadow over the narrative of Sally's healing process from the very beginning, because the reader (Sally doesn't for a long time) suspects that the siblings will meet at some point and that this cannot end well.

Peter grew up with his father, but was a kind of prisoner himself, not allowed to go to school or have any friends. He found out early on that someone was living in the barn of their house, but his father convinced him it was a ghost. The scene in which Peter enters the barn for the first time and meets his mother, who is heavily pregnant with Sally at the time, is of an almost unbearable intensity: Peter, still a child himself at the time, hits his mother, kicks her in the stomach.

His father said that was OK. And his father is all he knows in life.

Much later, after Denise and Sally's ordeal is over, Peter and his father flee Ireland to New Zealand. There they build a new life for themselves, but after Conor Geary kidnaps another child, it remains to be seen whether Peter will follow in his father's footsteps or be able to lead an independent life.

Liz Nugent is an expert in bizarre and dark family stories. Her novel "Little Cruelties", published in German in 2021, tells of three brothers who hate each other to death. In "Strange Sally Diamond", similarly convoluted as its predecessor and told on different timelines, Nugent darkens the world even further.

The focus is on the victims

The family here is a place of abuse and misogyny. In extreme cases, this of course applies to the rapist Geary and later his son Peter, who can never really distance himself from his father - "He was not a monster" becomes his mantra. But Sally's adoptive father, Nugent gradually reveals, was anything but perfect. For the psychiatrist, Sally was above all a case study.

Nugent tells of the devastation caused by physical and mental abuse, how it destroys people's lives forever. The focus is on the victims, but also shows how victims can become perpetrators. Rarely has a novel delved so deeply into these depths as Strange Sally Diamond.

Finally, a note for readers who, like Reese Witherspoon, don't like things too dark: the US version of Strange Sally Diamond has a somewhat more hopeful ending than the Irish original, which the German translation follows. Coming up with such an idea is stranger than Sally Diamond could ever be.