Diana Reid’s third novel is a steamy take on summer noir

An idyllic holiday in the south of France gone wrong, past and present colliding, love, grief, and friendship all tangled up. It seems like a formula for a page-turning book – and it is.

Diana Reid is best known for her debut, Love & Virtue.

An idyllic holiday in the south of France gone wrong, past and present colliding, love, grief, and friendship all tangled up. It seems like a formula for a page-turning book, and it is exactly what Diana Reid has offered in her new novel, ­Signs of Damage.

Reid, best known for her debut, Love & Virtue, which explored themes of sex, shame, and campus life, was previously dubbed the young author to watch, and those who have been keeping an eye on her will notice that Signs of Damage is a noticeable step up, both narratively and in scope.

 

This “summer noir”, as Reid describes it, takes readers beyond the Australian setting of her previous novels, transporting us to the south of France and Tuscany, where a European poolside holiday is laced with moral ambiguities and dark ­secrets.

The book begins, like any good novel should, in a coroner’s office in Tuscany. It is July 2024. Cass, an almost 30-year-old woman, has just had a seizure, one that has completely changed the course of her life. As she sits trying to piece together the events of the day, it becomes clear that this moment is just as much about the past as it is about the present.

Cass reflects on a holiday she took with her friend, Annika’s, family – the Kellys: confident patriarch Bruce, his much younger wife Vanessa, and their daughter Skye. This idyllic 2008 getaway took place in a villa in the south of France – “Instagrammable by any frame”. It’s there that the crucial event of the book occurs: for a few hours, Cass goes missing. After a few hours she is found, but the event changes the entire trip, and for some, their whole life.

Fast-forward 16 years later, and the group is reunited at Bruce Kelly’s funeral, where once again Cass is in the spotlight, this time collapsing. It’s from this event that Reid springboards into each and every character’s perspective and examines how they scramble to make sense of that fateful event in 2008. As she zooms in on each character individually, buried secrets come to light and instances of miscommunication resurface.

As Reid writes, “It was as if, as soon as her body hit the floor – as soon as the Kellys saw – the past reared up, strange and predatory: a crocodile running on its hind legs towards her”.

Throughout the novel, which initially lures readers into expecting a crime thriller, Reid digs deeper, offering a rich exploration of grief, gender, sexual assault, psychology, and parenthood – all while maintaining the unique voice of each character.

The setting, an increasingly oppressive beauty, only serves to amplify the tension. Reid also uses the weather to heighten the sense of unease: “Even the weather was indignant … The sunlight was shameless, the breeze gentle, the clouds decorative”. It’s these small details that create the book’s ­signature “summer noir” atmosphere, with echoes of Mike White’s thriller, White Lotus and Deborah Levy’s novel, Swimming Home.

As in all of her writing, Reid also manages to seamlessly weave the Australian perspective into contemporary fiction, with a razor-sharp focus on contemporary relationships, which is usually a domain dominated by international authors like Sally Rooney.

In one scene, Annika watches her beautiful, tanned sister, Skye, sunbathe and recalls the phrase “skin cells in trauma”, which was part of the Dark Side of Tanning mass media sun safety campaign during the 2000s.

“She waved a dismissive hand. ‘I’m busy, OK? I’ve got to, like, lounge around. These skin cells won’t ­traumatise themselves.’ Annika laughed at that: she recognised the phrase from the ad campaigns that had been everywhere in the Australian summer”.

Although she could be more economical with her prose at times, with some moments overly described, the overall feeling is that this book will have the same effect on her audience as her first: a page-turning book that is hard to put down. So, in the spirit of Signs of Damage, take a seat poolside with a cocktail in hand and let the drama, with a side of social commentary, ­unfold.

Alexandra Hill is a Melbourne-based journalist.