Book Club - Diana Reid’s Signs of Damage

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Diana Reid is the Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist in 2022. Her debut, Love & Virtue, won the ABIA Book of the Year Award, and the ABA Booksellers’ Choice Fiction Book of the Year Award.

Diana’s new novel is Signs of Damage.

How could everything have gone so wrong?

In the summer of 2008 the Kelly family are enjoying a holiday in the south of France. Bruce, Vanessa, their daughters Skye and Anika and Anika’s best friend Cass.The holiday seems something of an idyll until Cass goes missing. She is discovered hours later locked in an ancient icehouse but the question remains how?

Sixteen years later and the funeral for Bruce Kelly is being held a mere week before the wedding of his eldest daughter Skye. Partway through, the service is interrupted when Cass collapses in a seizure. After the shock of her collapse subsides, doctors will cast doubt on whether Cass’ seizures are the product of epilepsy, or some deeper, more mysterious malady.

What is happening to Cass and how does it relate to that summer in the south of France?

Signs of Damage has me intrigued from the get go. As we open on a coroner's office in Tuscany we understand immediately that something is very wrong. The narrative then throws us back in time where we will watch the events of the preceding week lead us up to the fatal moment.

Structurally, the novel pairs the fateful weeks in 2008 and 2024 and we travel alongside the characters from the Monday through the Saturday. While Cass emerges as our strongest point of view, with her first person narration bookending the narrative through the prologue and epilogue, we are treated to the perspectives of each of the main characters as we wind through their lives across the paired weeks.

These glimpses of perspective and insight serve to set up a tension between the story as it is lived and the way it is being perceived by each character. No coincidence in Cassandra’s name, as like her namesake from Greek mythology she seems cursed not to be believed as other characters make up their own mind about truth, and how the events of the past have shaped their present.

Signs of Damage works as a taut thriller but also as a kind of commentary on how the work of gripping storytelling turns on both the revelation and obfuscation of facts. We as readers are drawn into the web of storytelling as we too make our assumptions and tease out our theories about how the stories will fit together to reveal the greater picture.

At various times throughout my reading I wondered if I might be in the middle of a speculative, fantastical narrative or even perhaps an ‘all-in-their-head’ type psycho drama. The truth was in fact even more wonderful as I realised that I had become as active a participant in the action as any of the characters, only I was saved from having my theories impact, or perhaps injure the other players.

Signs of Damage is an insightful and entertaining exploration of trauma, mental health and our inner lives. It sets the stage for a drama and then allows its characters and yes even its readers to play out their theories until the inevitable and tragic ending.