Signs of Damage
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
It was as if the present and the past were linked: a spider’s web, wherein a shock to one strand could make the whole structure shake.
The Kelly family’s idyllic holiday in the south of France is disturbed when Cass, a thirteen-year-old girl, goes missing. She’s discovered several hours later with no visible signs of injury. Everyone present dismisses the incident as a close brush with tragedy.
Sixteen years later, at a funeral for a member of the Kelly family, Cass collapses. The present and the past start to collide as buried secrets come to light and old doubts resurface. What really happened to Cass in the south of France? And what’s wrong with her now?
A gripping tale of unravelling memories and moral ambiguities, Signs of Damage wrestles with the difference between understanding other people, and trying to explain them.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The third novel from London-based Australian author Diana Reid is a literary thriller grounded in themes of memory and trauma. While Reid’s 2022 dramedy Seeing Other People earned comparisons to Sally Rooney, Signs of Damage uses and then up-ends genre trappings in a way that recalls her multi-award-winning debut, Love and Virtue. The story takes place in both Sydney and the south of France over a six-day period in two alternating timelines—2008 and 2024. Meanwhile, the prologue and epilogue are told in first person by the protagonist Cass, a first-hand witness to tragedy on more than one occasion. With its true-to-life characters and authentic banter expertly delivered by narrators Sonya Kerr and Jessica Douglas-Henry, the story brilliantly seeds its suspense while examining the ways in which popular psychology is so often applied, in particular, to women.
