Our latest Calile Book Club novel is a dark, tense, fast-paced and thoughtful story, Signs of Damage by award-winning and bestselling author, Diana Reid.
In Signs of Damage, Reid expertly navigates and engages with the contemporary obsession with trauma. Both how unresolved trauma manifests physically in a character, but also how onlookers make assumptions of individuals, and their behaviour based on that trauma.
Reid explores how we quickly jump to conclusions about who a person is and why they behave the way they do based on such limited information. She states, “…people are always asking: ‘What’s this character’s wound?’ as if that will explain who they really are…. One of the things I love about fiction is when characters defy explanation and leave room for our imagination; when other people are mysteries to be marvelled at, not solved”.
Signs of Damage is a nuanced tale of memories, repressed secrets and life-altering tragedies – how we each have different perceptions of the past, and what hindsight can tell us about the moments that shape us.
Synopsis:
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.
About Diana Reid:
Diana Reid is a Sydney-based writer. Her debut novel, Love & Virtue, was an Australian bestseller and winner of the ABIA Book of the Year Award, the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Award, the ABA Booksellers’ Choice Fiction Book of the Year Award, and the MUD Literary Prize. Love & Virtue was also shortlisted for the Indie Debut Fiction Award, the ABIA Matt Richell New Writer Award, and Highly Commended at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Diana was also named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist in 2022.
