Signs of Damage

by Diana Reid

It was as if the present and the past were 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.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Book Club, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Literary Fiction

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 4, 2025

About the author

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. Seeing Other People is her second novel.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author with this name on GR

Reviews

[Irina · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning was good and the ending incomprehensible

[nilab · Rating 3 out of 5]

author could have done something very special with a plot like this and just…didn’t.

[Mon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the read but it didn’t stick the landing

[chloe · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/3.25 ?? i am incredibly conflicted when it comes to this book. i enjoyed it and thought the concept was interesting and appreciate the questions asked within the narrative, and maybe i’m just incredibly hypercritical of reid’s work—but it always feels like there is something left unsaid/something more that could have been done. i think this links back to the issues i have with her debut and sophomore novels, that she’s asking interesting questions through the characters and narratives she constructs but the answer/exploration of it all just feels disappointing? i think this story was a really interesting deviation from her previous work (though perhaps not as much as it’s been pitched to be). this is still undoubtably a diana reid novel; it has the aspects i like and those that i don’t. i think overall it was the ending that frustrated me. it all felt too rushed and somehow felt like a cop out even though it realistically made sense. still, im really interested to her reid herself speak about this in person soon. i didn’t hate this i just didn’t adore it either.

[John Gilbert · Rating 2 out of 5]

My second awful book finished tonight, both library ebooks. Having enjoyed Ms Reid's first two books, I was looking forward to the third by this Aussie writer, but it was a convoluted mess. Divided each chapter into two timelines, the first in 2008 in a villa in France, where most of the action was in an icehouse located on the property, the the present timeline located in Sydney and Italy. It was a total dogs breakfast with unlikeable characters with an underlying theme that made little sense. Only raised to 2 stars because I finished it, hoping for more, which never happened.

‘I don’t make anything,’ Harry was explaining to Rupert. ‘I’m just a barnacle on the ship of culture.’
‘I always think, some people make beautiful things, and then some people make things beautiful because of the way they describe them.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Rupert.’ pg 72

The only age-related trope to which Harry would not stoop was sitting for hours in front of the TV. Indeed, one of his most passionately held beliefs was that watching TV during daylight was ‘unseemly’, much like wearing brown shoes ‘in town’, or being American. So, on these visits, they sat in front of a blank TV, and talked. pg 81

Despite it being 1 February, the first day of spring, pg 83 Oh dear, not sure where the editor was here.

Her dark hair was pulled back into a tight, no-nonsense bun, and she wore no make-up, save for brown lipstick. High cheekbones hid the insults of age. pg 103 Insulting comment on age.

[Zara Mueller · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first section of the book was beautifully written and I loved some of the metaphors she used like “it was like listening to a piece of music, knowing you ought to appreciate it, that knowledge preventing you from doing so” and “she looked at his face, from one eye to the other, as if he were a sentence on a page”.
I seriously did not understand the ending though? I get that it’s left up to interpretation but I’m more confused than anything. I don’t even know what I don’t know - why so much talk of the seizures for this one substantial moment? why did it end so abruptly?

[Steph Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

*3.5
Signs of Damage tries to be deep and introspective, but it didn't quite hit it for me. The writing lacks finesse and feels like it tries too hard to sound 'literary'. I enjoyed the storyline and the overall mood, but the vague conclusion of Cass’s trauma felt off—especially given how deeply we’re immersed in her psyche at the begining. It’s as if the book sets something up only to step back from it.

[ariana · Rating 4 out of 5]

in her talk and novel, diana has this air of classical literary training — structurally and linguistically, this book checks boxes and executes its goals mostly well. some gripes - i thought the daily parallels were not animated well by textual signifiers beyond the title, i found the ending farcical, i found the theme of psychosomatism a little underexplored. regardless, in a short span of pages, she covers varied territory, much of which is quite novel

[Marjorie Hewitt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Signs of Damage

Yo-yo story.

I’ve finished and am dizzy - who-dun-it?

Cripes, who cares.

Unfulfilling read.

This one was to blame, no, no, this one. And I was the chump who kept reading!

[✨ jami ✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

in the first 100 pages I was like I don't really know why the review of this is so low in the last 100 I was like ok I get it

[MBC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional. 10/10.
I love Diana Reid and I can see her growth in her writing. Attending her author talk at Readings on Thursday evening was a brilliant setup to reading Signs of Damage. This is a superb work of new Australian literary fiction; “meticulous” to quote The Guardian.

Reid spoke a lot about the moral ambiguity she had her characters endure. Upon reflection, this is secondary to her exploration of character types. Who is the "type" of person to have seizures? Who is the "type" of man to grope a young girl? What type of person is one’s best friend... what type of person is one’s child... one’s wife... one’s sister? I enjoyed this interrogation of the distance between who we know someone to be and how they know themselves. We have expectations about people and rely on them to behave in certain ways. Do we really know the nearest and dearest in our lives?

Takeaways:
- Memory is unreliable.
- No one experiences the same event.
- It is human nature to prescribe meaning to everything.
- It is human nature to look for the “broken” parts of a person to explain who we think they are.

[Jaclyn]

Using tropes of the thriller, Reid asks the philosophical questions she is now known for. I love the veil of darkness she puts on her work and how much she has managed to achieve in just three books. I could not put this down and felt like I was reading The White Lotus in book form. There were some plot turns late in the book that I’m unsure about and need to mull over but they didn’t take away too much away from the overall reading experience. I love the way Reid writes and there were some sentences that I wanted to put in my mouth and absorb into my body like a normal person. Reid is a writer I want to be reading. @ultimopress Great shout out to @mandyhardiegrant in the acknowledgements too.

[Alia]

Crunchy crunchy interesting yummy good

[Alice Roundhill · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this but the ending really let this down for me. Wish the writing was paired with a better structured plot.

[Dakota · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started this book thinking it was going to be a 4-star read but it slowly unravelled. Too much philosophising and meandering about than an actual story.
Also there was a mistake in the middle of the book about the necklace and who it belonged to, not sure if anyone else noticed that.
Ending left a lot to be desired too. Disappointing as the premise sounded great and it started off intriguing but just lost me :(

[Charlotte Pascua · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5!
Um- WOW?!!! Kiss on the forehead for the beautiful red-headed princess who introduced me to Diana Reid with this ARC!

It’s been a while since I’ve been punched so hard in the face by an author’s writing. Gonna be thinking about this one for the foreseeable future.
Just read it.

[Rehanna Foster · Rating 2 out of 5]

I fear I’m being slightly harsh on this one. The writing itself is really strong, but the plot just didn’t do it for me. It felt a bit overly dramatic at times, like it was trying to be deeper or more profound than it actually was.

[⋆ Alice ⋆ · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️ rounded up

I love that Diana Reid explores psychological concepts with her characters, with this book focusing on trauma and how people attempt to crudely psychoanalyse themselves and others.

She examines how memories of a shared event contort to serve the beliefs of the beholder, and our tendency to attribute complex behaviours to a singular, explainable factor.

I did feel the narrative was a bit disproportionately simplistic compared to the themes being explored. The ending fell flat for me... it felt a bit abrupt and plain 🫣

[James Connolly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reid substitutes sparing prose and naturalism for plot-driven melodrama that never quite develops the characters beyond dull reflections on an event with a confused pay off. I found the writing oddly over-written, particularly the contemporary scenes and was largely disappointed.

[Rachel Baillie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strong for 80% of the book but a flat unsatisfactory ending.

[Jo Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very quiet and subtle novel that uses the spanning of time within a family, their relationships and life to unravel a current trauma, a trauma that is going unrecognised. The author provides a really clever insight into how many people will remember moments in wildly different ways. How many truths there are.

Overall a gentle story with a heavyweight punch.

The audio narration by Jessica Douglas Henry and Sonia Kerr was great.

Much gratitude to W F Howes LTD and NetGalley for the opportunity to review this audiobook 🎧

[Olive · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is messy

[Victoria Gillespie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reid is a (self consciously) good writer, but I just think she’s wrong.

[ValTheBookEater]

easily diana's better book but even then there was something missing. the jump across timelines from 2008 to 2024 were good but I don't how to feel about the ending; it felt like it was coming but felt quick and unclear and unsatisfactory.

many characters felt underdeveloped, and I wish we saw more of skye, and even vanessa. anika felt the most fleshed out, as we hear her perspective more frequently (sometimes more than cass who is at the centre of the plot). this was probably deliberate but it didn't feel right when it came to the end.

I also think the repressed trauma could have been explored further because it felt secondary to developing the tension of differing recollection of events.

this review captures a lot of good points: https://www.artshub.com.au/news/revie...

[Iona Carys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lit fic with thriller/mystery vibes. I feel like you have to go in expecting just a lit fic because the thriller/mystery element was a little bit underwhelming. Overall enjoy Reid’s writing but not my fav of hers.

[ally · Rating 4 out of 5]

diana reid may be back??

i think angus is right re the suspense being better than the payoff, though

[Jamilla Carr · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️ had 4 star potential if it weren’t for the ending…

[Eva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed reading this one and ++ on the incredible Diana Reid writing, but overall this was honestly forgettable, and not a fan of the rush of an ending at all.

[Jemimah Rankcom-Toll · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book perfectly showcases Diana Reid phenomenal writing and was so hard to put down.

I’ll write a more in depth review closer to the release date, but for now I’ll say if you love Diana Reid’s previous books and are hoping this will live up to it - I can assure you it does and more.

[Rosy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Some genuinely atrocious writing in this one