Strange Sally Diamond: A BBC Between the Covers Book Club Pick

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S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. A special thanks to Simon and Schuster Canada and NetGalley for an arc of Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent, in exchange for an honest review. She toured the world with Riverdance as a stage manager and later worked in an administrative role in RTÉ on its flagship soap Fair City. But as Sally discovers WHY she “IS AS SHE IS” and steps out into the World for the first time, at age 44, she will actually come into her own despite the traumatic events of her earliest years, AND the man on the other side of the World who knows her as “Mary”.

He has left letters detailing what he knows of the horrific events that led up to her adoption, but we know, from a second narrator, that the truth is even worse … Nugent’s fifth novel is her best yet: evil perpetuates evil in a heartbreaking but humane tale of people damaged beyond repair. Sally is socially stunted to the point where she pretends to be deaf when in town so she doesn't have to interact with anyone. Isolated and without friends, Sally is blunt and forthright in her communication and lacks comprehension of what is deemed acceptable in social situations.I enjoyed the black humour in the story, a lot of which comes from Sally believing what people say, and her emotional disconnection from the events and people around her. It won’t be easy because, with the secrets, there are people from her past complicating things further and possibly threatening her physical and mental well-being. He'd always said that she should “put [him] out with the trash” when he dies, so when it happens, she tries to burn his body in their incinerator. He was small and frail and eighty-two years old by then, so it was easy to get him into one large garden waste bag. Abandoned as a baby, Anna lost her adoptive mother early and was consigned to boarding school by a distant father.

Here, for all living creatures, reality can overwhelm and therefore the suggestion of a dream world is a viable alternative. Since her 2013 debut Unraveling Oliver she has confronted human behaviour at its most venal, most selfish.Strange Sally Diamond can't remember her life before her 7th birthday when she was adopted by a loving couple unable to have children of their own. They say it takes just three alcoholics to keep a small bar running in a country town and while myself and the cousin, Thomas, were doing what we could, we were a man shy, and these were difficult days for Mr Kelliher, licensee of the North Star, Pearse Street . Sally’s unfiltered honesty is brilliant and she makes me laugh and at other times when things get too hard for her you want to take her pain away.

Luckily for me, psych thrillers/psych suspense/domestic noir/accessible lit/ psychodrama (all labels that have been attached to me) stories have been in demand since the days of Daphne du Maurier, Henry James, Patricia Highsmith and Barbara Vine. This has chilling, harrowing and heartbreaking themes that will take you through a rollercoaster of emotions, and have you rooting for Sally as the trauma in her background begins to emerge. As a police procedural series develops, we grow less interested in procedure and more invested in the police. It is a measure also perhaps of Maeve’s growing confidence that she is no longer perceived as a threat.

Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent is complex, dark, and compelling with deft characterization and skillful storytelling. Now she’s the center of attention, not only from hungry reporters and police detectives, but also a sinister voice from a past she does not remember.

Liz Nugent creates the most brilliantly complex, intricate characters and as always, I found myself completely absorbed in the storyline and had to continue reading until I finished the book. Sally is seen as strange and different and doesn’t think the way that others might think it’s socially acceptable.One of the most original, and spine-tingling books I’ve read in ages, Liz Nugent’s Strange Sally Diamond draws you in to the close, claustrophobic world of rural Ireland and the life of an emotionally withdrawn woman whose dark, hidden past is coming back to haunt her. Sally has been isolated, she has no circle of friends, her mother is dead, and in her naivety she literally does what her father had asked when he dies, she puts him out with the bins.