Sunday Independent review by Sophie White

Liz Nugent’s new thriller Strange Sally Diamond is a cut above

Book review

Liz Nugent is the master of macabre meditations on the human condition

Sophie White

February 26 2023 

 

“‘Put me out with the bins,’ he said regularly. ‘When I die put me out with the bins. I’ll be dead, so I won’t know any different. You’ll be crying your eyes out,’ and he would laugh and I’d laugh too because we both knew that I wouldn’t be crying my eyes out. I never cry.”

When a book opens with a body disposal you might think you know what you’ll be in for, but Liz Nugent has always revelled in upending expectations and this, her fifth novel, is no different. By paragraph two of Strange Sally Diamond, 40-something Sally is following to the letter her father’s request, noting that at 82 years old: “He was small and frail… so it was easy to get him into one large garden waste bag.”

When she proceeds to perform a slightly bungled home cremation, her insular life is cracked open, as first police then the media descend on the secluded house she has lived in since being adopted as a child of seven. 

With the first two succinct paragraphs Nugent expertly pitches us into an unpredictable, unforgettable story. When this much plot is piled into the opening pages you know Nugent has something unique and fascinating in store for us.​

After authorities have arranged for a more lawful dispatch of Sally’s father and a funeral has taken place, Sally finds several letters from him relating the horrifying events that led to her adoption, events that have been erased from her memory and go some way towards explaining what her father has always termed her “social deficiency”.

In Sally Diamond, Nugent has given us an astounding creation with a singular voice. For three decades, she has been isolated, and enabled by her psychiatrist father who loved her while also taking an unnervingly clinical interest in her development.

At school she was ostracised, she struggles with social interaction, feigning deafness rather than engaging with people. She has a childlike literalness, hence her attempt to inter her father in a waste bag.

As the people of her village begin to encroach on her ordered existence, she grapples with adjusting to a new life and accepting a past that is far darker than anyone can imagine.

To say much more on the novel’s trajectory would be a spoiler, but rest assured it is an absorbing, twisty, compulsive psychological thriller with surprising humour and pathos.

Despite her unequivocal strangeness, Sally is unexpectedly relatable; we can’t but cheer her on as she begins to forge friendships and create a new life for herself.    

The second narrator is the considerably more slippery Peter, whose connection to Sally is revealed in a tightly paced parallel timeline that exposes the full horror of her origins.

In Peter, Nugent revels in ambiguity. He is repellent yet empathetic and deserves a spot beside Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley as a compelling entity, both repugnant and strangely sympathetic.

It is just this type of character that Nugent specialises in. Peter brings to mind two other skin-crawling Nugent creations: Oliver from her first novel, Unravelling Oliver, and Delia Russell of Skin Deep. As always, Nugent is the master of macabre meditations on the human condition.

Strange Sally Diamond will no doubt draw comparisons to Emma Donoghue’s Room as they share narrative commonalities but in many ways the novel feels closer to the kind of Irish rural noir we have in Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy and Graham Norton’s Holding.

Also similar to McCabe’s work is the often surreal wit Nugent employs, providing respite from what otherwise could have been a relentlessly bleak and heartbreaking story.

‘Strange Sally Diamond’ by Liz Nugent, Sandycove, €14.99

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Liz talks to Ryan Tubridy on publication day

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Liz on the Graham Norton Radio Show