Book Review: Strange Sally Diamond – Liz Nugent

I received a copy of this book from the publisher.

About The Book

Sally Diamond cannot understand why what she did was so strange. She was only doing what her father told her to do, to put him out with the rubbish when he died. Now Sally is the centre of attention, not only from the hungry media and police detectives, but also a sinister voice from a past she cannot remember.

As she begins to discover the horrors of her childhood, Sally steps into the world for the first time, making new friends and big decisions, and learning that people don’t always mean what they say.

But who is the man observing Sally from the other side of the world? And why does her neighbour seem to be obsessed with her? Sally’s trust issues are about to be severely challenged.

My Review

Meet Sally Diamond. She’s 42 years old, lives with her Dad in a remote house near a small town in Ireland, and is deemed to be ‘strange’ by the locals who don’t really understand her. No matter, her Dad understands her, except he is elderly and gravely ill, and hasn’t really explained his predicament to Sally. He’s always joked with her that when he dies, he doesn’t want any fuss, and to ‘put him out with the rubbish’. So that’s exactly what she does. But, her Dad has always refused to pay for bin collections and instead they have an incinerator in the back garden, so she wraps him up and pops him in that. Job done.

Of course, this doesn’t really work, and people find out that she has essentially bunged her Dad in the bin. This sets in motion a chain of events which involves the police, locals shunning her, friends of the family and an estranged aunt trying to help her, and a mysterious teddy bear arriving in the post which Sally feels an immediate affinity for.

And that’s all I can really tell you without spoiling the book.

What I will say is that Strange Sally Diamond is a very dark book, it went places I didn’t expect at all, and Nugent has written a very clever and twisty narrative which examines a myriad of themes. Some readers will find some of the subject matter really upsetting, I’m not easily triggered but there were some moments which I found difficult to read. This book does not shy away from big, difficult themes and because the characterisation and writing is so strong it feels like a punch to the gut when bad things happen.

Sally in particular is well-written. It would be so easy to make her a joke, using her naivety and lack of social graces as a way to laugh at her, but she is written with multiple layers. Yes there are moments which are funny; one line about Harrison Ford made me howl, and her take down of a racist deserved a huge round of applause, but she is more than just her quirks. Nugent was able to evoke a huge range of emotions for Sally, at times sympathy, at others frustration but overall lots of love.

Nugent is unafraid to explore the dark and the depraved, but it is not written in black and white, there are multitudes of grey. She asks the reader to examine their capacity for empathy but will happily pull the rug out from under us and have us questioning our prejudices. I do have to admit to finding it a little meandering in the middle, and I didn’t love the end, but overall, I enjoyed it. It is an absolute page turner of a book, I read it in one day and a week on I am still thinking about it. It is one of those books and will certainly provoke discussion – it would make a perfect Book Club book.

This is my first Liz Nugent and I will certainly look up her others. The writing is strong, it is cleverly plotted and I admire a book unafraid to examine big, difficult subject matter. Despite the darkness, there is a lot of heart in Strange Sally Diamond.