Australian readers were introduced to Diana Reid when her debut, Love and Virtue, was published in 2021, and she became that most unusual creature: a bestselling young novelist. Her third novel, Signs of Damage – like her debut and its 2022 follow-up, Seeing Other People – is concerned primarily with the way young women negotiate social norms and mores, and the way certain hidebound conventions shape the way they make sense of their lives.
In Signs of Damage, the target is trauma narratives – and the vehicle is a thriller, in which the reader is presented with not one but two mysteries to solve, and invited to reflect on how these two mysteries are related; whether the one is made inevitable by the other.
