Over her first four psychological thrillers, Irish author Liz Nugent has shown she’s a master at taking readers into some dark, twisted corners of family relationships. She’s been a magician with hard-to-like protagonists, igniting our curiosity, fascination, even empathy, through her rich characterisation, superb prose, and sublime storytelling.
While she’s already scooped four Irish Book Awards among her accolades, Nugent may have raised the bar even higher with her new novel, Strange Sally Diamond. I devoured this unique tale in a few hours over a single day. It’s a page-whirrer, with depth, and a truly unforgettable main character. Sally Diamond is a ‘socially deficient’ lady in her 40s whose neurodivergence and occasional extreme outbursts may be more nurture rather than nature. While her teenage years and adulthood were perhaps too sheltered, her earlier years were about as grossly traumatic as they could be. Though she can’t remember them.
So when her fellow villagers and the police are horrified by what Sally did, she can’t understand why. She was just doing what her adopted father, a retired psychiatrist, asked. When he dies, no fuss, just ‘put him out with the bins’. You burn rubbish, right? Public notoriety brings extra pressure on a woman struggling to find her place, but as Sally comes into herself and starts connecting with others, her terrible past comes back too.
Exquisite storytelling, a full palette of emotions; dark and funny, hope and despair.
Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Liz was born in Dublin in 1967.
Liz first began to write for broadcast in 2003. Between 2003 and 2013, she worked as a Story Associate on the popular television soap opera Fair City. She had several pieces accepted for Sunday Miscellany, a radio series on RTE Radio 1 specialising in nostalgic autobiographical writing.
Subsequently, she had two children’s stories accepted by the Fiction 15 series for the same broadcaster. In 2006, her first short story for adults, Alice, was shortlisted for the Francis McManus Short Story Prize.
Liz went on to write a children’s animation series called ‘The Resistors’ for TG4. Her half-hour drama, The Appointment was one of four winners chosen to be broadcast live on TG4 in the Seomra Sé series.
Liz’s first novel Unravelling Oliver was published to critical and popular acclaim in Ireland in 2014. It quickly became a firm favourite with book clubs and reader’s groups. In November of that year, it went on to win the Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and was long listed for the International Dublin Literature Prize 2016. She was also the winner of the inaugural Jack Harte Bursary provided by the Irish Writers Centre and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Dec 2014.
Her second novel, Lying in Wait, was released in July 2016. It went straight to number 1 in the Irish Bestseller lists, remaining there for nine weeks and spent eight months in the top 10.
In September 2016, Liz was awarded the Ireland Funds Monaco bursary and went to Monaco for a month to write in the Princess Grace Irish library.
In November 2016, Lying in Wait won the RTE Ryan Tubridy Show Listener’s Choice Award at the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards. The book was also shortlisted in the Crime Fiction category. It has been long listed for the Dublin International Literary Award 2018.
Lying in Wait was chosen as part of the Spring 2017 list for the very prestigious Richard & Judy Book Club in the UK and in April 2017, it was the winner of the Reader’s Choice Award of the Richard & Judy Spring List.
Scout Press, published Unraveling Oliver in 2017, Lying in Wait in 2018 and Little Cruelties in 2020. She is very pleased to be in the editorial hands of Jackie Cantor in New York and Nita Pronovost in Toronto. Unraveling Oliver was chosen for the BEA Book Buzz panel at Book Expo in June 2017 and Lying in Wait topped the Canadian charts in January 2019.
Liz was honoured to win the Irish Tatler Woman of the Year award in Literature in October 2017.
Her third novel, Skin Deep was published in 2018. In November that year, it won two awards: Crime Novel of the Year, and RTE Radio Listener’s Choice Award at the Irish Book Awards. It subsequently won a Dead Good Award for The Book You Can’t Put Down at Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate, Yorkshire in July 2019.
In March 2020, just as the country went into lockdown after the pandemic of Covid 19 hit Ireland, Our Little Cruelties was published in Ireland. Nevertheless, it retained the number one spot for 12 weeks and remained in the top 10 for five months.
It was published in the UK in paperback in January 2021, and was published in the USA and Canada under the title ‘LITTLE CRUELTIES’ in November 2020. In February 2021 Liz was honoured to accept the James Joyce Medal from the L&H Society of University College Dublin. Previous recipients include Bill Clinton, Seamus Heaney, J K Rowling and Sue Townsend.
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