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

£9.9£99Clearance
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I haven't read any other Liz Nugent books but I will certainly be trying others, because with troubled characters, lots of twists and dark themes, and really clever storytelling - what's not to like!

She mostly stays at home, her social anxiety and severe PTSD from her unremembered life before, has left her socially awkward and she often misreads social cues made by others. But Gil is also middle-aged, with debts and a stalled career, whereas Matthew has not only won over Gil’s wife and daughters but has his whole life – and a multimillion-dollar trust fund – ahead of him. Sally is one of two narrators, and she's a bit odd, mysterious even, but her story is compelling and she pulls you along.Sally thinks the joke is that her father says she’ll be crying her eyes out, but she never cries, so har har.

The relative lack of privacy in the Close means the pair will have to maintain their facade outdoors and in.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.

As far as I'm concerned this is the BEST Liz Nugent book I have read yet and I've enjoyed the previous two books I've read of hers immensely. As she adjusts to new friends, media attention and self sufficiency, secretsI was the same age as 15-year-old Ann Lovett when she and her new born baby died in 1984 in a grotto in Granard. Believe me, Liz Nugent will give us plenty here to discuss, to mull over, and to make inroads into identification and prevention. Kind of how Sally realized at the end that her therapist Tina had been wrong about everything- “I was right to trust nobody. Yet as Sally begins to deal with the fallout from her actions, she finally begins to connect with others. 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.

Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.An act that attracts headlines with the attention of the media and the police, and all the tumult, trauma and chaos it brings. The characterization makes it feel like these are real people and real situations, and that makes it even more heartbreaking. The story reveals a woman who has had a traumatic childhood that has left her with behaviours that others find disturbing. And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. Further exploration into the main character produced her first best-selling novel Unravelling Oliver.

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