The Joys of Binge Reading

This week on The Joys of Binge Reading, Strange Sally Diamond, the latest, dark and twisted thriller from award-winning Irish novelist, Liz Nugent.

Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading today, Liz talks about her gripping new psychological bestseller, always laced with black humor, and explains how Sally is pretty like herself; “Liz, without a filter.”

She tells us what she’s learned from TV shows like Breaking Bad and how she came to set part of her story in New Zealand.

We’ve got our usual book give away, Historic Fiction with Strong Female Leads this week, including one of my books. Sadie’s Vow book one in my latest Home At Last series.

Sadie makes a death bed promise to her mother to protect her younger sister, but when an infatuated Phoebe debunks with a mob boss, Sadie has her work cut out.

GET FREE HISTORICALS

https://books.bookfunnel.com/strongfemaleleadsmay2023/tugfi9kl88

And don’t forget, if you enjoy this show, leave us a review wherever you listen to the podcast, so others will find us too. It really does help spread the word.

Links mentioned in the show

Unravelling Oliver: https://www.liznugent.com/unravelling-oliver

The Girl On A Train: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22557272-the-girl-on-the-train

Gone Girl: https://www.amazon.com/Gone-Girl-Gillian-Flynn/dp/0307588378

Craig Sisterson: https://thespinoff.co.nz/authors/craig-sisterson

Ngaio Marsh Awards: https://newzealandbooks.com/product-category/awards/ngaio-marsh-awards/

Otago University Centre for Celtic Studies: https://www.otago.ac.nz/ciss/index.html

Professor Liam Mcilvanney: https://www.otago.ac.nz/ciss/people/otago716926.html

Liam.mcilvanney@otago.ac.nz

Our Little Cruelties: https://www.liznugent.com/little-cruelties

Skin Deep: https://www.liznugent.com/skin-deep

Lying In Wait: https://www.liznugent.com/lying-in-wait

Sarah Hilary, Black Thorn; https://sarahhilary.com/

Vanda Simon: https://www.vandasymon.com/

Paul Cleave: https://www.paulcleave.com/

Fiona Sussman: https://www.fionasussman.co.nz/

Dame Fiona Kidman: https://fionakidman.com/

The Secret History by Donna Tartt: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29044.The_Secret_History

The Book of Evidence by John Banville (Booker Prize winner): https://www.amazon.com/Book-Evidence-John-Banville/dp/0375725237

Light A Penny Candle – Maeve Binchy: https://www.amazon.com/Light-Penny-Candle-Famous-Firsts/dp/045121143X

Where to find Liz online

Website: https://www.liznugent.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/liz.nugent.399

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/liznugentwriter/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lizzienugent

But now, here’s the show.

Introducing thriller writer Liz Nugent Award winning best selling thriller author Liz Nugent

Hello there, Liz and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Liz. Hello there, Liz, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Liz Nugent: Hi Jenny. Thank you very much. It’s nice to be virtually in New Zealand. I wish I was there for real.

Jenny Wheeler: I think that you have visited here, haven’t you, but we’ll talk about that a bit a little bit later.

You’ve had a brilliant career as a novelist. You’re onto book five, we’re going to be talking about today, but right from the very start, you’ve had bestsellers and lots of very positive attention.

You’ve won numerous Irish book awards We should mention if people don’t realize it from your accent that you are talking from Ireland.

How did you manage to hit the ground running like that?

Liz Nugent: I don’t know. I think, I think my first novel Unraveling Oliver, it came. It came at it. It’s a domestic noir story in the same way that Girl On A Train and Gone Girl were those sort of domestic stories.

They weren’t like police detective thrillers, they’re about things that happen within families or within broken families or centered around the home and the domestic situation.

The rise of the ‘domestic thriller’ genre Unravelling Oliver – Liz’s debut novel made the top of the best seller list

I think Unravelling Oliver rode in on the coattails of those books. They all came out around the same time, so I think certainly in Ireland I went almost straight to number one. The book came out, it was a debut, it didn’t go straight to number one.

I think it languished around nine or 10, but I was so thrilled to be in the top 10, and then suddenly it went to Number One and it stayed there for weeks and weeks. 13 weeks or something at Number One.

I was so shocked. And then it went on to win a Crime Novel of the Year Award, which was a further shock because I didn’t know I’d written a crime novel.

Jenny Wheeler: Actually, that is the domestic thriller genre, which has come into huge popularity in the last few years. And do you have any feeling for why that might be, why it resonates with readers at this time?

Liz Nugent: I think possibly it might have something to do being the time that Me Too was becoming such an issue.

Women were beginning to speak out about the abuses in the workplace and domestic abuse, and so possibly that might be a, a reason why it caught fire the way it did.

And why people are looking at these stories that women are writing about domestic terrorism as opposed to international espionage, which is kind of the preferred domain of men.

And we were talking about, hang on a second, you could be terrorized in your own home as well as by somebody else’s army or somebody else’s renegades.

Terrorism can happen in the kitchen as well as it can happen on the battlefield.

An unforgettable opening read aloud

Jenny Wheeler: All of your books all have intensely brilliant twists and your newest and the one we’re talking about today, strange, Sally Diamond is no exception.

The opening is really mind boggling when you read that first paragraph. And because it is so striking, I wondered if you’d just mind reading that first paragraph to us.

Liz Nugent: I should have had this open before we started, but here we go.

“Put me out with the bins. He said regularly when I die, put me out with the bins. I’ll be dead. So I won’t know any different. You’ll be crying your eyes out. And he would laugh, and I’d laugh too, because we both knew that I wouldn’t be crying my eyes out.

I never cry.”

Jenny Wheeler: In those few lines, you’ve already told us that Sally is different from other people,

Liz Nugent: Mm-hm

It establishes the fact that there is something not typical about Sally’s behavior. She’s somebody who doesn’t cry and is quite confident about the fact that she doesn’t cry. The question asked in that first paragraph is, is she not crying because she doesn’t love her father?

Or is she not crying? You know what, why?

“It just sounds off because she, they’re laughing together, and yet she’s not going to cry when he dies. There’s something strange about Sally.”

What Liz Nugent learned from TV

Jenny Wheeler: That’s absolutely right. And all of your books that I’ve seen anyway, have exactly that same shock opening.

You’ve said that you learnt this from TV shows like Breaking Bad. Tell us a bit about that.

Liz Nugent: Well, I loved Breaking Bad and The Sopranos and all of those shows like Ozark, about very flawed and damaged people.

I think they’re far more interesting than the Waltons or Little House in the Prairie, which are all about like lovely families who are all very nice.

I just find flawed and damaged characters – in fiction I hasten to add – my husband is a very nice man, but I find those flawed characters very interesting.

In most of the other books now, I’m not talking about Sally Diamond, but most of the other books, they’re told from the point of view of a sociopath or a psychopath.

This is the first time I’ve departed a bit from that and written from the point of view of somebody who’s actually very good and straightforward, almost too straightforward because of her difference.

I really enjoyed writing her. It was quite a relief because I had always lent towards writing these monstrous characters before.

But writing Sally was a great relief to me.

I really loved her by the end of it.

Getting inside the heads of monsters

Jenny Wheeler: How do you get inside the heads of these monsters?

Liz Nugent: Well, alarmingly easily. I did some acting training. I trained as an actress many, many years ago, and I think that really helped me to get inside the mind of a character.

So when it’s a character that I’m writing myself, I think like they do, and so the the kind of sociopathic characters that I’m dealing with, it’s not like they wake up in the morning thinking ‘Whose life am I gonna screw up today?’

It’s always that they have some rationale behind it.

“She shouldn’t have provoked me” or “he brought it on himself.”

Or “if he hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have had to do that.”

There’s always some rationale behind the way that they’re thinking, so that they have a kind of a superiority complex and, and they have a logic behind their actions.

Even though it’s really a skew, there is a logic to what they do, and a lot of it stems from background trauma.

And that is also the case with Sally, but because she doesn’t remember any of it. all of this happened, all of the trauma that happened to Sally happened before she was seven years old and for various reasons, which are revealed in the book, she doesn’t remember any of it.

She has no idea when we meet her, around the age of 42, I think she has no idea what her background really is.

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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} Sally is Liz Nugent’s first ‘non-monster’ lead character

Where she really came from. She has always known that she was adopted, but she hasn’t been curious about her birth parents because she’s very accepting of what’s in front of her.

Her mother who, died when she was a teenager, as far as she knows, and her father, who is her adoptive parent -I’m talking about her father, who is a psychiatrist, – but turns out very early on in the book to have been her mother’s psychiatrist, which leads us down a very dark path.

Jenny Wheeler: You also manage, however, even with some of these dark characters to create sympathy and understanding for them.

And I’m thinking in Sally about Peter who, in the end, he follows an inevitable path into the dark side, which. we fully understand because we’ve seen all the way through the book the things that are happening to him.

But in the end, when he makes that final self-justifying call, we’re still shocked by it.

I thought that was a wonderful, delicate way that you allowed him to continue to develop, but end up really very like his own father.

Liz Nugent: Yes. I didn’t know that that’s what I was going do with him until I got to the end, and then I just thought, okay.

If this was the scenario – I can’t really say too much without spoiling it – but if this is the scenario, Peter and Sally are the main characters in the book, Sally’s story is told in the present tense, in present day at least.

And Peter’s story is told from his childhood up to the present day.

Inevitable – the good and the bad collide

And somewhere along the line you realize that these timelines are going to collide at some stage.

And I wasn’t sure how things would play out when they did collide, when they did finally meet as adults.

When I got there, I really rattled my brain and thought, okay, would they find commonality?

Would they get on? And I realized that it wouldn’t really be possible given their extremely different backgrounds and extremely different experiences despite their relationship.

I can’t say any more than that because it spoils it, but they’ve had very different experiences and I just didn’t see any other way of it ending for him.

Jenny Wheeler: Mm.

Liz Nugent: I didn’t see that he could find redemption in any other way. So yeah, he goes off down a bad road.

Jenny Wheeler: A good part of Strange Sally does take part in New Zealand because the villain of the piece debunks to New Zealand when he fears that he’s going to be caught.

And so quite a bit of the book is located in a tourist town in New Zealand called Rotorua, which is famous for its mud hot pools.

I see on your website that you have conducted workshops in New Zealand. I wondered if you’d been to Rotorua during that trip or whether you used the web to find out all the details about it.

Liz Nugent’s foray Down Under

Liz Nugent: No, no. I was invited to the University of Otago in Dunedin, where there’s a Centre for Celtic studies, Scottish and Irish studies run by a Scottish crime writer called Liam McElvane.

He held a festival called Celtic Noir in the. autumn, your spring of 2019.

I spent three or four weeks driving from the top of the North Island down to the bottom of the South Island because I thought if I’m going all the way to New Zealand. First of all, I want to see it.

And second of all, why not organize a mini book tour?

So I enlisted the help of my good Kiwi friend, Craig Sisterson.

I’m sure you know him, and Craig set up a tour for me and one of the stops on the tour was Rotorua and I was really taken with the place and plus it has an excellent bookshop, McLeod’s bookshop.

I think I’ve mentioned McLeod’s in the book. I think it does get a mention and Whitcoull’s (another NZ book store) gets mentioned too.

I always try to mention bookshops and libraries, real bookshops and real libraries in books that I write, because bookshops and libraries are so important to me and to every writer and reader.

It suited me because I had to do a little bit of research on not just about the hot pools, which are important to the story, but also about property prices.

If somebody was to run away and try to set up a new life in New Zealand in 1980, where would be the cheapest place to buy property? And from my research, I found out that it would be Rotorua.

Craig Sisterson and the Ngaio Marsh Awards Craig Sisterson – a champion of Australian and New Zealand crime writing

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, fantastic. That answers another question actually, because one of your characters has got the surname, Sisterson.

And of course I do know Craig. He’s well known in New Zealand because he set up the National Mystery Writer awards called the Ngaio Marsh Awards, and so I thought, oh, ‘she’s having a little joke here.’

Liz Nugent: Yes. there’s a few names that are dropped in here and there, but that was a little homage to Craig because he was so brilliant organizing that tour for me.

He designed posters and put me in touch with libraries and bookstores and readers and other Kiwi writers. That was great.

I was interviewed by, by New Zealand writers when I did those events. It was really nice, really good.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely and I do get a feeling just from that you might also enjoy black humor.

We won’t explain why, but there’s a teddy bear that features in the story and right at the very end, there is a very nice touch with the teddy bear that left me smiling and thinking you really do seem to have quite a sense of underlying black humor.

Would that be right?

Maintaining humour in the drakness

Liz Nugent: There’s a lot of very dark because the story is so dark.

There’s one aspect of the story that is very dark. Sally, who dominates the story, people laugh at her and she is not comfortable with that. Who would be?

But she also has a really good sense of humor herself, and she voices the kind of things… She’s like me without a filter.

She says things that you shouldn’t say to people.

She gets herself into really awkward situations a lot.

I like to play with that. There’s one scene when like the really monstrous character goes to London and it’s at the height of the IRA campaign and when somebody hears his Irish accent, they accuse him of being an IRA member and he’s absolutely,

Astounded and shocked and horrified that somebody should call him or should think that he was a terrorist, when in fact he is a worse terrorist on the domestic front than any IRA bomber ever was.

Like, he is such a monster. I had a lot of fun with putting some humor in among the darkness because you can’t write something relentlessly grim.

You have to even it out, balance it out with some humor.

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Liz Nugent – Dark & Twisty Thrillers