Irish Independent review by Myles McWeeney

Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent: Echoes of Donoghue’s Room in captivating examination of a traumatic past

Myles McWeeney

March 4th 2023

Sally Diamond can’t understand what the fuss is about. She had only done exactly what her elderly psychologist father Thomas Diamond had told her to do. Her mother died when she was 18, so she had been looking after her father for years and he always said to her that when the end came, she should just throw him out with the rubbish. So when he died, she put him in a black plastic bag, surprised at how light his frail 82-year-old body felt, took him out to the home incinerator that burned all their rubbish and set him alight.

Suddenly, to her intense distress, Sally becomes the object of horrified curiosity, not only to the villagers of Carricksheedy, where she and her father have lived as semi-recluses, and where she has always been referred as “strange Sally Diamond”, but also to the gardaí and the global media.

Her attempt at an amateur cremation also brought to light the sensational but virtually suppressed details of her childhood. She had known she was adopted, but had no memory of anything that happened to her before the age of seven. And it is true that Sally, now in her early 40s, is, and has always been, seriously out of step with the rest of society. She possesses no social filters, so takes everything people say to her quite literally, as evidenced by her interpretation of her father’s remark about throwing him out with the rubbish.

Sally may be “unique”, as her father always told her, but she is highly intelligent. She scored excellent results in her Leaving Cert and her mother had wanted her to go to university. Sally, however, didn’t want to leave the house and mix with strangers, and her father backed her decision.

In the months following his death, Sally begins to learn how to engage with the outside world. Helped by Dr Angela Caffrey, her mother’s former partner in their GP practice, she takes tentative steps into what to her is a strange new world, tentatively trying to make friends and, eventually, finding a part-time job as a pianist. But she also discovers that people don’t always mean what they say.

Through a combination of media reports and studying her adoptive father’s diaries charting his highly questionable psychiatric and pharmaceutical treatment of her, she begins to understand just how horrific and utterly different her childhood had been. She is aware that her natural father had been a dangerous psychopath who had committed a heinous crime and fled the country. He had been the subject of an international manhunt for years.

The surprise arrival of a parcel containing a battered childhood toy, an object she doesn’t recognise but that strikes a strong connection with her, suggests that someone somewhere knows far more about her and her past than she finds comfortable.

The mysterious toy and a string of cryptic messages propel Liz Nugent’s utterly captivating examination of Sally’s traumatically damaging past and difficult rehabilitation to a new level of horror. The reader is drawn into an all too believable, almost mundane, world of cunningly planned evil and the age-old debate about nature versus nurture. It begins to strike home that, for all her hard won self-belief and fragile independence, Sally is still desperately vulnerable and not everyone close to her has her best interests at heart.

This is a really striking and immersive construct, with perhaps the faintest of echoes of Emma Donoghue’s Room and John Fowles’ 1960s thriller The Collector, but delivered brilliantly in Nugent’s distinctive voice.

Thriller: Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent

Sandycove, 384 pages, paperback €14.99; e-book £7.99