Diana Reid, the Australian author who has quickly cemented herself as a sharp observer of youth, morality and desire, returns with Signs of Damage, her third novel. With Love & Virtue and Seeing Other People, Reid proved her knack for capturing the restlessness of young adulthood and the ethical ambiguities of modern life. In Signs of Damage, she shifts her focus to the trauma narrative.
Reid begins the novel with the epigraph: “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” This quotation, misattributed to Freud, sets the tone for a novel as much about the stories characters tell themselves as it is about the events themselves. In her author’s note, Reid expands on this, remarking that Signs of Damage is a “testament to subjectivity – to that inescapable human tendency to bend the facts to suit our story”. This preoccupation with fragmented truths and shifting recollections is what informs the novel.
It all begins at a funeral – Bruce’s, a successful older man, married to Vanessa, an adopted Chinese-Australian woman (though this complexity is never fully explored). They have two daughters: Skye, the charismatic elder sister, and Anika, the troubled one. The funeral unfolds as expected (to the extent that any funeral can) until Cass, a former friend of the sisters, suffers a seizure, an inciting incident that triggers a return to an unresolved past.
The novel’s mystery unfolds across time, circling back to a fateful trip to France in 2008, when Cass was trapped in the ‘icehouse’ – an insulated shack in the backyard – for hours. How she ended up there and what happened in the wake of that night, becomes the novel’s central enigma, along with a second, equally perplexing event in 2024, when another holiday – this time a wedding in Tuscany– ends in a fatal fall from a balcony.
Reid’s third novel reads like a poolside noir with surrealist undertones – its eerie icehouse, ghostly lore, the theatricality of the fatal fall. The detached third-person narration sweeps across perspectives; there’s a lot of characterisation to cover alongside the instability of trauma itself. Trauma, after all, has become one of contemporary fiction’s most overworked preoccupations – a phenomenon Parul Sehgal dissects in The Case Against the Trauma Plot – a piece Reid herself cites as formative in shaping the novel.
Sehgal argues that trauma has become a narrative crutch, a shortcut to character depth that often sidesteps complexity. Signs of Damage successfully avoids the most egregious pitfalls of the trauma plot, but occasionally leans too heavily on withholding information, maintaining tension, but at the cost of character depth. The novel’s reliance on narrative gaps – from both reader and character – elicits that familiar exasperation: ‘Just talk to each other!’
The effect of this fragmentation is a cast of characters who, though distinct, often feel insubstantial. Skye, despite her prominence in the narrative, remains opaque – the quintessential ‘cool girl’. Rupert, the older writer neighbour, is more dark spectator than character. Even Anika, whose suffering is most directly examined, appears overdetermined, a composite of confusing signifiers and heavy burdens. She is the tortured one, the social outcast, the stubborn intellectual who is also single, readily conforms to fashion trends and is terrible at public speaking (Reid really doesn’t let her catch a break).
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Naturally, the novel does not conclude with a neat resolution, offering only fleeting clues. The mystery remains murky. Cass, in a sudden shift to first-person narration in the epilogue, delivers a version of events that she can “live with”. The reader, left to sift through the novel’s fractured truths, is given no authoritative answer. Yet, for all its ambiguity, Signs of Damage remains an engaging read, well-suited to fans of contemporary realism. Reid rarely panders to her audience, trusting us to parse the novel’s uncertainties and choose our own ending.
Signs of Damage, Diana Reid
Publisher: Ultimo Press
ISBN: 9781761151095
Pages: 304pp
RRP: $34.99
Publication date: March 2025
