Signs of Damage by Diana Reid
“I realise that this is a futile exercise, that tragedy is random and its senselessness is precisely its cruelty. Still, it’s only natural to look for an explanation. We turn to the past and try to identify a turning point, an originating trauma, a moment after which the tragedy became neither random nor senseless, but inevitable.”
Diana Reid collectively wowed us with her debut Love and Virtue (2021), while her second novel, Seeing Other People (2022), was another literary love for many readers. With her third novel, Signs of Damage (2025), Reid continues to showcase her prowess for diving deep into the internal worlds of her characters, but this time with a bit of a shift. Signs of Damage toes the line of being a psychological thriller, without leaning too hard into the tropes that typically accompany the genre.
The book opens with a prologue in first-person narration, grounding us in the present – the idyll of Italy, the aftermath of a disaster. We learn someone has died tragically, and it may not have been entirely an accident.
“What happened on that balcony – who hit who, whether intentionally or not, whether there was a push or a fall, how the whole scene played out – I don’t know. In a sense, I wasn’t there.”
From here, the book switches to third person and moves between two points in time, detailing a complete week in each: a sun-drenched holiday in the south of France in 2008 and a sombre gathering in Australia prior to a destination wedding in Tuscany in 2024. At the heart of both events is Cass, whose adolescence was marked by a mysterious incident and whose adulthood is shadowed by unexplained seizures.
In 2024, Cass experiences one such seizure at the funeral of her best friend’s father, Bruce Kelly. On the back of this one experience, the Kelly family are called to reflect on the events of 2008, what happened, to whom and why.
In 2008, 13-year-old Cass is invited on holiday with the Kelly family in the hope that she can make her then-best friend, Annika, happy. Alongside Bruce and Annika is the eldest Kelly daughter, Skye and their mother, Vanessa. Joining them is Bruce’s lifelong friend Henry, who has become the guardian to his great-nephew, 19-year-old Sam, whose mother has recently died. Completing the group is another resident on the property, Richard, an enigmatic forty-something writer who spends most of his time smoking on his balcony and watching the rest of the group by their pool from behind his sunglasses.
Thrown into the mix of this setting is an ancient, small dark outhouse building, used to store ice before the invention of refrigeration, a missing necklace and rising tensions. As the different members of the group get caught up in their own secrets and desires, Cass goes missing for several hours, only to be discovered hours later, locked in the ice house.
“Those few seconds, wherein no one could see or be seen, were long and excruciating. Especially when they were measured not by a clock but, upon reflection, by how long they felt and by what they contained.”
What happened to Cass while she was locked away, and who would do such a thing to a young girl? Why was Richard seen running away and where was Sam? The individual experiences of the group compel them to create their own answers to these questions, some more dangerous than others. We have all the ingredients for a perfect who-dunnit mystery thriller, but Reid isn’t interested in simple resolutions or dramatic reveals.
What Signs of Damage does exceptionally well is maintain a slow, low-level dread that tightens its grip the more we understand how power, protection and perception play out. The mystery becomes less about what happened and more about how and why people allow certain truths to be buried. Through Annika’s complicated psyche, we get to explore how one incident can create a snowball effect of incidents, leaving her to define her own narrative in life, one that doesn’t always align with reality. Through Cass, we explore the complexities of psychological diagnoses, where they fall short and what they mean (or how they lack meaning) in the face of tangible lived experiences.
“With her arm around her old friend, Cass could feel the pull of their childhood dynamic. She would tell her about the strangeness of her illness: how it lay in a marginal place, somewhere between mind and body, beyond the reach of diagnosis and treatment. Anika would probably like this conversation. She knew something about being an anomaly.”
Reid’s characters don’t offer emotional monologues – they hold things in and push things down. This creates a kind of charged quietness that some readers may find too subtle or even frustrating, especially if they're expecting a more traditional thriller payoff. Others, though, will relish how Reid turns genre expectations on their heads, using suspense as a lens to explore female adolescence, trauma and complicity.
If Love and Virtue grappled with ethical grey zones in university culture, and Seeing Other People unpacked the murky terrain of family and fame, Signs of Damage is Reid at her most atmospheric and ambiguous, deliberately leaving space for readers to feel both unsettled and implicated.
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com.
