Strange Sally Diamond is the latest book by bestselling author Liz Nugent. When we first meet Sally Diamond, she is odd, an outsider who prefers her routine quiet life and pretends to be deaf when interacting with locals. People assume she is on the spectrum because she has great difficulty understanding others and social cues. She lives with her elderly psychiatrist father in a remote house. However, literal thinking Sally’s life is suddenly thrust in the spotlight after the death of her father. Her strange peculiar upbringing is revealed and her traumatic childhood prior to being adopted at age 7 is in the forefront of the news. Her life is in upheaval with many secrets and lies from her past exposed, bringing new people in her life, some with questionable motives.

What I liked about this book:
-loved Sally, her unique voice and quirky and awkward personality- how she views the world is fascinating
-alternating POVs between Sally and Peter and the different timelines
-Sally’s relationship with her townsfolk especially Nadine and Angela as well as the children Abebi, Maduka and their parents Udo and Martha Adebayo who all play a role in helping Sally navigate her expanding new world and add a protective element
-brings up the question of can someone move past childhood trauma and thrive as a member of society particularly in the case of Peter/Steve
-found the Libby storyline particularly intriguing
-enjoyed the complex, well written characters that showed people are multidimensional and are not inherently good or evil but have different degrees of both
-Sally/Mary’s life before being adopted with her birth mother Denise

What I disliked about the book:
-I loved everything about this book with one minor complaint that I would have love to see more story development in the epilogues of Peter and Amanda

My rating 5 out of 5

My final takeaway: I loved this book, at times it was hard to read and devastating and traumatic but other times heartwarming and uplifting. I was enchanted by Sally and her unique view of the world as well as how she managed to come out of her adversity and grow as an individual. Highly recommend this book for fans of Room and other child abduction stories.

Trigger warning: torture, abduction and kidnapping, PTSD, pedophiles, rape, gaslighting and mental illness

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Canada for this eARC.

I love, loved this book! Strange Sally Diamond is strange, dark, quirky and horrifying. It's a book that will hit readers at one extreme or another, Love or Hate. It's also a book that is very difficult to review.

At first meeting, Sally seems to be on the spectrum. But as the story progresses, the reader quickly learns that she is a very damaged person as a result of her past.

Sally's past is horrifying and there are trigger warnings for violence and abuse. As Sally comes to terms with her past, she has to deal with it in the spotlight of the news. Such a challenge, but interesting for the reader to follow.

There are arguments as to whether the story is credible or not. I challenge those reviewers to pick up a newspaper or to just use Google to figure it out. “Truth is stranger than fiction.” So, even though this is fiction, there are events out there that are equally compelling/horrifying. It was a page-turner for me, but it is not a book for every reader.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the Advance Readers Copy.

I made it to 22 % and had to DNF. The themes of childhood PTSD became too much for me to read.

Up until then, I was enjoying the book. I think trigger warnings should have been added.

Overall this book is kinda heavy- the trauma of family secrets can be a very difficult subject area. Liz Nugent has done an excellent job of unraveling family history/drama/tragedy in this tale. Strange Sally Diamond starts out on somewhat of a humourous note, describing Sally’s quirks and social awkwardness. As the story progresses bits and pieces of her history, and that of an unknown sibling, are revealed and the story masterfully unfolds.
Thank You to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster Canada and Liz Nugent for the opportunity to read and enjoy this ARC.

Liz Nugent has a craft for creating complex, interesting characters and she didn’t disappoint here. Sally’s character development throughout the story is heart-warming and gives the story plenty of hope. It was one I finished very quickly, as it just couldn’t put it down. That being said, I REALLY didn’t like the ending. Honestly, it kind of ruined the entire story for me. It was a massive let down from my perspective, and is the reason I’ve rated this one 3.5 stars. I was still captivated by 95% of the story and I could be the minority here. Overall, a captivating read that just left me feeling a little disappointed.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This is a book that will take you through a whole gamut of emotions, it’ll make you gasp at times yet warm your heart too. The characters are well rounded and come across as believable, whether you love them or hate them. This provocative, dark and twisted story grabs you from the first page and keeps you guessing until the very end! With themes of mental illness, abduction, misogyny, rape, and human cruelty and abuse, this was not a light read. That being said, Nugent’s writing is sharp and clever and despite all the horrors the story has heart, soul and most of all hope.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Shuster Canada who provided me with a copy of this book. I am voluntarily leaving an honest review.

I really enjoyed this book. I kept picking it up whenever I had a spare minute to find out what was going to happen next.. Sally Diamond reminded me a little of Eleanor Oliphant having social anxiety and not being able to read social cues, but Sally Diamond's problems run far deeper. They all stem from childhood trauma that Sally must confront. The book had many dark themes running through it: pedophilia, sexual abuse and physical abuse, so it is not for anyone that has those as emotional triggers. The book is well written and addresses these issues head on as opposed to using them as a plot device. I really enjoyed Sally and her straightforward take on the world. There are a few surprises in the book, which is always a treat, and the ending does not wrap everything up in a pretty bow, which is something as a reader that I really appreciate. I want to thank Simon and Schuster and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest feedback. I would strongly recommend this book!!

Sally Diamond is strange. She lives in a remote location with her father. She does not work. She pretends to be deaf so that people won't talk to her. And when her father dies suddenly, she tries to dispose of his body by throwing him out with the trash, because that was what he regularly told her to do when he died. When the town catches wind (literally) of this, a media shitstorm begins, and Sally's bizarre history becomes the focal point of the story. And whatever you think Sally's 'bizarre history' is, I guarantee you are wrong, because it is batsh!t crazy.

Strange Sally Diamond started off odd and got progressively weirder. What I thought was going to be a quaint story about a neurodiverse character got reeeeeally dark and disturbing. Trigger warnings? Yes, all of the trigger warnings! All oft them! But, I was here for it. It was super disturbing, but captivating, and the psychology of trauma and trauma response kept running through my head.

Unfortunately, as the plot moved toward it's conclusion, the story just...fizzled out. No climax. A super disappointing ending to one of the most unique stories I've ever read.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for an advanced reader's copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review. Strange Sally Diamond is scheduled to be published in North America on July 18, 2023.

One of my favourite books of 2023 already. Delighted to include it in the July edition of Novel Encounters, my regular column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction for the Books section of Zoomer, Canada’s national culture magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

This was a trip - I absolutely loved the main character and wanted to protect her at all costs immediately. This story is not for the faint of heart, there are a lot of hard subjects explored here (it gets dark yo) but if you're willing to take the twisty journey I promise you won't be disappointed.
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I honestly can't say much without spoiling so I'll drop the synopsis below instead. Regardless, it was a solid 4 star read for me

Thank you Net Galley for ARC of Strange Sally Diamond
This definitely was strange. I did have a little difficulty keeping track of the secondary characters in Sally’s current life. I found the writing very simple, and the storylines disturbing, but I was intrigued, and wanted to know the outcome. I am not sure that I should have bothered. A cross between The Room and Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine. Sally did have her moments. Blunt, funny and unfiltered.

Strange Sally Diamond is another compelling and intriguing read by Liz Nugent.

The book is shocking and unforgettable and oddly enough not only heart breaking but you hear touching.

Sally is an oddity there is no doubt. Her story is a horrific one and yet she makes you laugh.

Strange Sally Diamond will no doubt be a Book Club choice and it certainly will be the talk of the summer.

Its a journey the reader must take on their own to get the full effect of the story and all the characters.

My review does not do the book jusitice,

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Canada, Simon & Schuster for an unforgettable read.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster Canada and NetGalley for an advance e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

Sally Diamond is a quirky, eccentric character with little to no social skills due to her upbringing.
This is a story of heartbreak, growth and empowerment sure to leave you wanting more. I loved everything about this story, Sally's tenacity and her strife to better herself was a joy to read. Sally had to overcome a tragic past and learn how to live and interact with family and the new friends she has made.

Everyone that picks up this read is sure to love it.

This book was a refreshing change from the usual serial killer books
Sally was adopted into a family when she was approximately5 to 6 years old.
She really doesn't know much about her childhood before that, or she just doesn't remember.
Sally has always been an odd duck, keeping mainly to herself as she lacks confidence.
.When Sally's adoptive father passes away, he has told her that she is just to throw him out. She tries to burn his body herself to cremate him. Odd behavior, to say the least, but she really doesn't know any better. When she starts going through her father's papers, with the help of a family friend, she starts to unravel her sorted past. The more she learns, the more she realizes that she needs help to understand what exactly happened to her birth mother. Who was her father? Where is he now? Will he come after her?
Sally makes some friends and come to grips with her past with the help of a friends she learns the truth.
This is a very dark read. Sally was a victim, as was her biological mother. I really loved this book.
Many more victims will surface, and surprises along the way. I really loved this book. I give it a 4.5 out of 5.

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.
Expected publication date: July 18, 2023
A neurodivergent protagonist. A woman who gives birth in captivity. A dark, twisted misogynistic pedophile who manages to live an unassuming life with his son. Is there anything that this book doesn’t have? “Strange Sally Diamond” by Liz Nugent has absolutely everything I look for in a great read, and I was instantly hooked.
Sally Diamond has lived in relative isolation her whole life, living with only her father for company after the death of her mother when Sally was a teenager. But after Sally’s father passes away, she is forced to face the world without his support. Awkward and untrusting around people, Sally keeps her interactions with her community to a minimum. Due to the mysterious circumstances of her father’s death, Sally’s isolation is invaded and deep dark secrets from her past are revealed, secrets Sally herself wasn’t aware of. Like her real name, her birth parents and most especially, her childhood before the age of seven. When Sally starts receiving strange messages and gifts from an unknown sender, she has to reach out to the people she previously avoided, in order to find out who she is and where she came from, all while trying to fit into a world where she so clearly stands out.
Every one of Nugent’s stories has been a five-star for me, but I think this one tops the list. Sally is unstoppable, brave and completely honest, even though her childhood trauma should make her anything but. Faced with criticisms and judgment her entire life, she is confident in who she is, which helps build an immediate rapport and sense of empathy with the reader. The tense, non-stop plot is full of twists and turns, and right from the first page, there was no slowing down.
“Diamond” is a creative combination of “Room” and “The Maid”, with Nugent magic thrown in. The unguessable ending was just the cherry on the top and, in case there is any remaining doubt, I will be lining up for Nugent’s next read.

Sally Diamond and her father, a retired psychiatrist, live a quiet and secluded life in Ireland. Sally is so socially awkward, she pretends to be deaf when running errands in town. She also takes things quite literally and complies with her dying father's request to be thrown out with the trash after he passes away. This action brings the police and media to her doorstep and her whole life changes when she starts to learn about her biological parents.
I'm giving this book a five-star review because I could not put it down. I was drawn to the characters, especially Sally, and although the story got very dark at times, I couldn't stop rooting for a somewhat happy outcome. Fortunately, the story also had humor, hope, and a cast of strong and compelling characters.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this novel.

This was an intriguing read about a neurodivergent woman with a mysterious and devastating childhood.

For the most part of really enjoyed the story, especially the dual POVs however the ending was odd. It felt like it just ended with a very open ended conclusion. It also felt a tiny bit rushed.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster Canada for an advanced digital copy of this book. All opinions in this review are my own. Solid 4 stars!

Irish crime novelist Liz Nugent is quickly becoming one of my favourite authors. Of the previous books of hers that I have read, all of them have been outstanding. Unraveling Oliver was an enthralling read with a twist ending, and Lying in Wait was even more diabolical with its devastating conclusion, too. Now comes Nugent’s latest work, Strange Sally Diamond, and it is a delicious read indeed. Like its predecessors, it has an ending of sorts that you might not see coming. And it’s obvious from reading all these books that Nugent is an author of considerable skill — plus, she has the hardware to back it up. She has won four Irish Book Awards and the James Joyce Medal for Literature. With that knowledge in hand, you can say that Nugent is an author who can transcend the genre she’s working in. She’s not a particularly literary writer, but her work is solid and, what’s more, entertaining. It may also make you feel a tad bit uncomfortable, as she can write effective thrillers where life isn’t always fair to their main characters. Indeed, Nugent’s real talent lies in the fact that she knows how to write compelling and complex characters who may not have anyone’s best interests at heart. That’s what makes Nugent so special — she can twist the screws rather well when she needs to.

I don’t think I’m giving away much detail in this paragraph where I summarize the book because Strange Sally Diamond is upfront early on about various aspects of its plot. (However, if you want to be surprised by this book, you can jump down a paragraph.) This novel may be a less crime-oriented book on the surface than past efforts of the author’s and is less of a whodunnit and more of a whydunnuit. (This is also not an original thought: others on the Interwebs have said the same thing.) It’s also more of a slow burn of a read. It takes its time to get going, but once it does (about midway through), you won’t be able to put this story down. It concerns the titular character, who, when we’re introduced to her, has thrown her recently deceased adopted dad’s remains into an incinerator behind her house because she has mistaken his instructions on how he would like to be buried. The result of this causes a bit of a media uproar in Ireland, where the book is largely set, and it turns out there might be a reason for Sally’s weirdness that seems to border as being somewhere on the autism spectrum at first blush. It turns out that Sally is so unusual because she has buried trauma issues: her real birth mother was kidnapped as an 11-year-old and tied to a chain inside a barn or shed behind a pedophile’s house. Sally (born with the name Mary) came into existence when her birth mother was around 18 years old and lived with her in that barn for seven years — a time of which she remembers absolutely nothing. The book then recounts Sally’s attempts to reintegrate into society since both of her adopted parents are now dead and she must make it through life on her own — which is difficult because her adopted father sheltered her. Meanwhile, Sally is getting strange gifts in the mail from New Zealand and a man she has recently met has become infatuated with her and her case. Is any of this (the gifts and her new friend’s obsession) connected to Sally’s horrible and deplorable upbringing?

The interesting thing about this novel is that it shares common ground with another book by a female author with partial Irish heritage: Emma Donoghue and her book Room. Strange Sally Diamond may be a bit off-putting because of that — not because the subject matter is so repulsive, but because this ground has been covered elsewhere before. However, there are some zingers in terms of plot twists happening here, and that’s its main selling point because of its carbon copy cloning of a previous novel. However, if you’ve read Room (and I hope I’m not spoiling anything here), only half of that book is spent in captivity. This book lingers on it a bit longer, since it is also partially narrated by Sally’s brother, Peter, who was born not long after Sally’s/Mary’s birth mother was abducted. Peter is close to Sally’s/Mary’s biological father who is also very misogynistic in addition to being a child kidnapper and rapist. So we see the world through Peter’s eyes, and that worldview is pretty warped as he is led to believe that he has a skin condition that prevents him from getting close to others and has also learned that women are not to be trusted by his father. In a sense, Strange Sally Diamond is a character study of what makes certain men turn out to be so rotten, in so much as it is a novel about what happens to someone who has experienced violence as a child.

This is a rip-roaring great read once things begin to pick up and the chapters end on cliffhangers. My only complaint about the book is that it has multiple endings — it would have been fine to just end on one character’s story because it is so repugnant (it would have made a great shock final ending) rather than pile on a couple of other endings to tie up loose ends and redeem certain characters. Well, I guess I have two complaints: the book does take its time to become an exciting, thrill ride of a read. It marinades in Sally’s uniqueness, but once Sally begins to change, the reader begins to identify with her and root for her to pull through all the weirdness that is being thrown her way. Despite those complaints, this is still a more than worthwhile read. This is a commanding character study of people who do bad things — sometimes because they were just born that way, and sometimes because life experiences have molded them a certain way. At the end of the day, Strange Sally Diamond is a good book and another feather in Liz Nugent’s cap. World, I want to introduce to you one of my newest favourite writers, because this novel proves that its author is worthy of a lot of accolades for writing things that deviate from the normal thriller “thrill rides.” Strange Sally Diamond surely is a treat and proves that anything Nugent touches is mostly gold.

I love Sally Diamond. I want to give her a big smile, not a hug because she would hate that. This book had everything I could have wanted. It ripped your heart out, scared you, made you nervous and was frustrating in the best way. It's difficult to write much about this book without giving away spoilers, but learning about Sally's complex and tragic past along with her was a great journry that never got boring. Some of the twists were obvious, but others you didn't see coming. The end was so impactful and haunting. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

I didn’t want this one to end!

This is my first book by Liz Nugent but it will not be my last. I was so engrossed in the story that I missed everything going on around me. When I was at school pickup, cars parked all around me and I never noticed.

Sally Diamond doesn’t remember anything before she turned seven. She feels social anxiety and isolates herself from others. When her father dies and she follows his verbal instructions on what to do with his body to a T, she doesn’t understand the attention. Then media come around and everyone wants to talk to her and they keep calling her Mary. Then a teddy bear arrives in the mail from someone who goes by S and Sally recognizes it immediately. Questions about Sally’s past before she was adopted at age 7 come to light and neuro-atypical Sally struggles to process everything.

Told in alternating POVs between Sally at age 43 and a young boy named Peter who we see grow up, Strange Sally Diamond is a satisfying page-turner that I would highly recommend.

Nugent has written in depth characters and evokes an emotional response to many of them. As the story unfolds, I was captivated by the breadcrumbs dropped along the way.

In addition to the suspenseful pacing, the story questions one’s nature and if nurture truly is enough to change a life.

For fans of Room by Emma Donoghue and Alice Sebold’s The Lucky Bones, Strange Sally Diamond is going to be a summer smash when it hits shelves July 18, 2023. Many thanks to @simonschusterca and @netgalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinions. Pick this one up!