Show notes
This week on The Joys of Binge Reading, Strange Sally Diamond, the latest, dark and twisted thriller from award-winning Irish novelist, Liz Nugent.
Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading today, Liz talks about her gripping new psychological bestseller, always laced with black humor, and explains how Sally is pretty like herself; “Liz, without a filter.”
She tells us what she’s learned from TV shows like Breaking Bad and how she came to set part of her story in New Zealand.
We’ve got our usual book give away, Historic Fiction with Strong Female Leads this week, including one of my books. Sadie’s Vow book one in my latest Home At Last series.
Sadie makes a death bed promise to her mother to protect her younger sister, but when an infatuated Phoebe debunks with a mob boss, Sadie has her work cut out.
GET FREE HISTORICALS
https://books.bookfunnel.com/strongfemaleleadsmay2023/tugfi9kl88
And don’t forget, if you enjoy this show, leave us a review wherever you listen to the podcast, so others will find us too. It really does help spread the word.
Links mentioned in the show
Unravelling Oliver: https://www.liznugent.com/unravelling-oliver
The Girl On A Train: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22557272-the-girl-on-the-train
Gone Girl: https://www.amazon.com/Gone-Girl-Gillian-Flynn/dp/0307588378
Craig Sisterson: https://thespinoff.co.nz/authors/craig-sisterson
Ngaio Marsh Awards: https://newzealandbooks.com/product-category/awards/ngaio-marsh-awards/
Otago University Centre for Celtic Studies: https://www.otago.ac.nz/ciss/index.html
Professor Liam Mcilvanney: https://www.otago.ac.nz/ciss/people/otago716926.html
[email protected]
Our Little Cruelties: https://www.liznugent.com/little-cruelties
Skin Deep: https://www.liznugent.com/skin-deep
Lying In Wait: https://www.liznugent.com/lying-in-wait
Sarah Hilary, Black Thorn; https://sarahhilary.com/
Vanda Simon: https://www.vandasymon.com/
Paul Cleave: https://www.paulcleave.com/
Fiona Sussman: https://www.fionasussman.co.nz/
Dame Fiona Kidman: https://fionakidman.com/
The Secret History by Donna Tartt: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29044.The_Secret_History
The Book of Evidence by John Banville (Booker Prize winner): https://www.amazon.com/Book-Evidence-John-Banville/dp/0375725237
Light A Penny Candle – Maeve Binchy: https://www.amazon.com/Light-Penny-Candle-Famous-Firsts/dp/045121143X
Where to find Liz online
Website: https://www.liznugent.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/liz.nugent.399
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/liznugentwriter/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/lizzienugent
But now, here’s the show.
Introducing thriller writer Liz Nugent
Award winning best selling thriller author Liz Nugent
Hello there, Liz and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Liz. Hello there, Liz, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Liz Nugent: Hi Jenny. Thank you very much. It’s nice to be virtually in New Zealand. I wish I was there for real.
Jenny Wheeler: I think that you have visited here, haven’t you, but we’ll talk about that a bit a little bit later.
You’ve had a brilliant career as a novelist. You’re onto book five, we’re going to be talking about today, but right from the very start, you’ve had bestsellers and lots of very positive attention.
You’ve won numerous Irish book awards We should mention if people don’t realize it from your accent that you are talking from Ireland.
How did you manage to hit the ground running like that?
Liz Nugent: I don’t know. I think, I think my first novel Unraveling Oliver, it came. It came at it. It’s a domestic noir story in the same way that Girl On A Train and Gone Girl were those sort of domestic stories.
They weren’t like police detective thrillers, they’re about things that happen within families or within broken families or centered around the home and the domestic situation.
The rise of the ‘domestic thriller’ genre
Unravelling Oliver – Liz’s debut novel made the top of the best seller list
I think Unravelling Oliver rode in on the coattails of those books. They all came out around the same time, so I think certainly in Ireland I went almost straight to number one. The book came out, it was a debut, it didn’t go straight to number one.
I think it languished around nine or 10, but I was so thrilled to be in the top 10, and then suddenly it went to Number One and it stayed there for weeks and weeks. 13 weeks or something at Number One.
I was so shocked. And then it went on to win a Crime Novel of the Year Award, which was a further shock because I didn’t know I’d written a crime novel.
Jenny Wheeler: Actually, that is the domestic thriller genre, which has come into huge popularity in the last few years. And do you have any feeling for why that might be, why it resonates with readers at this time?
Liz Nugent: I think possibly it might have something to do being the time that Me Too was becoming such an issue.
Women were beginning to speak out about the abuses in the workplace and domestic abuse, and so possibly that might be a, a reason why it caught fire the way it did.
And why people are looking at these stories that women are writing about domestic terrorism as opposed to international espionage, which is kind of the preferred domain of men.
And we were talking about, hang on a second, you could be terrorized in your own home as well as by somebody else’s army or somebody else’s renegades.
Terrorism can happen in the kitchen as well as it can happen on the battlefield.
An unforgettable opening read aloud
Jenny Wheeler: All of your books all have intensely brilliant twists and your newest and the one we’re talking about today, strange, Sally Diamond is no exception.
The opening is really mind boggling when you read that first paragraph. And because it is so striking, I wondered if you’d just mind reading that first paragraph to us.
Liz Nugent: I should have had this open before we started, but here we go.
“Put me out with the bins. He said regularly when I die, put me out with the bins. I’ll be dead. So I won’t know any different. You’ll be crying your eyes out. And he would laugh, and I’d laugh too, because we both knew that I wouldn’t be crying my eyes out.
I never cry.”
Jenny Wheeler: In those few lines, you’ve already told us that Sally is different from other people,
Liz Nugent: Mm-hm
It establishes the fact that there is something not typical about Sally’s behavior. She’s somebody who doesn’t cry and is quite confident about the fact that she doesn’t cry. The question asked in that first paragraph is, is she not crying because she doesn’t love her father?
Or is she not crying? You know what, why?
“It just sounds off because she, they’re laughing together, and yet she’s not going to cry when he dies. There’s something strange about Sally.”
What Liz Nugent learned from TV
Jenny Wheeler: That’s absolutely right. And all of your books that I’ve seen anyway, have exactly that same shock opening.
You’ve said that you learnt this from TV shows like Breaking Bad. Tell us a bit about that.
Liz Nugent: Well, I loved Breaking Bad and The Sopranos and all of those shows like Ozark, about very flawed and damaged people.
I think they’re far more interesting than the Waltons or Little House in the Prairie, which are all about like lovely families who are all very nice.
I just find flawed and damaged characters – in fiction I hasten to add – my husband is a very nice man, but I find those flawed characters very interesting.
In most of the other books now, I’m not talking about Sally Diamond, but most of the other books, they’re told from the point of view of a sociopath or a psychopath.
This is the first time I’ve departed a bit from that and written from the point of view of somebody who’s actually very good and straightforward, almost too straightforward because of her difference.
I really enjoyed writing her. It was quite a relief because I had always lent towards writing these monstrous characters before.
But writing Sally was a great relief to me.
I really loved her by the end of it.
Getting inside the heads of monsters
Jenny Wheeler: How do you get inside the heads of these monsters?
Liz Nugent: Well, alarmingly easily. I did some acting training. I trained as an actress many, many years ago, and I think that really helped me to get inside the mind of a character.
So when it’s a character that I’m writing myself, I think like they do, and so the the kind of sociopathic characters that I’m dealing with, it’s not like they wake up in the morning thinking ‘Whose life am I gonna screw up today?’
It’s always that they have some rationale behind it.
“She shouldn’t have provoked me” or “he brought it on himself.”
Or “if he hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have had to do that.”
There’s always some rationale behind the way that they’re thinking, so that they have a kind of a superiority complex and, and they have a logic behind their actions.
Even though it’s really a skew, there is a logic to what they do, and a lot of it stems from background trauma.
And that is also the case with Sally, but because she doesn’t remember any of it. all of this happened, all of the trauma that happened to Sally happened before she was seven years old and for various reasons, which are revealed in the book, she doesn’t remember any of it.
She has no idea when we meet her, around the age of 42, I think she has no idea what her background really is.
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Sally is Liz Nugent’s first ‘non-monster’ lead character
Where she really came from. She has always known that she was adopted, but she hasn’t been curious about her birth parents because she’s very accepting of what’s in front of her.
Her mother who, died when she was a teenager, as far as she knows, and her father, who is her adoptive parent -I’m talking about her father, who is a psychiatrist, – but turns out very early on in the book to have been her mother’s psychiatrist, which leads us down a very dark path.
Jenny Wheeler: You also manage, however, even with some of these dark characters to create sympathy and understanding for them.
And I’m thinking in Sally about Peter who, in the end, he follows an inevitable path into the dark side, which. we fully understand because we’ve seen all the way through the book the things that are happening to him.
But in the end, when he makes that final self-justifying call, we’re still shocked by it.
I thought that was a wonderful, delicate way that you allowed him to continue to develop, but end up really very like his own father.
Liz Nugent: Yes. I didn’t know that that’s what I was going do with him until I got to the end, and then I just thought, okay.
If this was the scenario – I can’t really say too much without spoiling it – but if this is the scenario, Peter and Sally are the main characters in the book, Sally’s story is told in the present tense, in present day at least.
And Peter’s story is told from his childhood up to the present day.
Inevitable – the good and the bad collide
And somewhere along the line you realize that these timelines are going to collide at some stage.
And I wasn’t sure how things would play out when they did collide, when they did finally meet as adults.
When I got there, I really rattled my brain and thought, okay, would they find commonality?
Would they get on? And I realized that it wouldn’t really be possible given their extremely different backgrounds and extremely different experiences despite their relationship.
I can’t say any more than that because it spoils it, but they’ve had very different experiences and I just didn’t see any other way of it ending for him.
Jenny Wheeler: Mm.
Liz Nugent: I didn’t see that he could find redemption in any other way. So yeah, he goes off down a bad road.
Jenny Wheeler: A good part of Strange Sally does take part in New Zealand because the villain of the piece debunks to New Zealand when he fears that he’s going to be caught.
And so quite a bit of the book is located in a tourist town in New Zealand called Rotorua, which is famous for its mud hot pools.
I see on your website that you have conducted workshops in New Zealand. I wondered if you’d been to Rotorua during that trip or whether you used the web to find out all the details about it.
Liz Nugent’s foray Down Under
Liz Nugent: No, no. I was invited to the University of Otago in Dunedin, where there’s a Centre for Celtic studies, Scottish and Irish studies run by a Scottish crime writer called Liam McElvane.
He held a festival called Celtic Noir in the. autumn, your spring of 2019.
I spent three or four weeks driving from the top of the North Island down to the bottom of the South Island because I thought if I’m going all the way to New Zealand. First of all, I want to see it.
And second of all, why not organize a mini book tour?
So I enlisted the help of my good Kiwi friend, Craig Sisterson.
I’m sure you know him, and Craig set up a tour for me and one of the stops on the tour was Rotorua and I was really taken with the place and plus it has an excellent bookshop, McLeod’s bookshop.
I think I’ve mentioned McLeod’s in the book. I think it does get a mention and Whitcoull’s (another NZ book store) gets mentioned too.
I always try to mention bookshops and libraries, real bookshops and real libraries in books that I write, because bookshops and libraries are so important to me and to every writer and reader.
It suited me because I had to do a little bit of research on not just about the hot pools, which are important to the story, but also about property prices.
If somebody was to run away and try to set up a new life in New Zealand in 1980, where would be the cheapest place to buy property? And from my research, I found out that it would be Rotorua.
Craig Sisterson and the Ngaio Marsh Awards
Craig Sisterson – a champion of Australian and New Zealand crime writing
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, fantastic. That answers another question actually, because one of your characters has got the surname, Sisterson.
And of course I do know Craig. He’s well known in New Zealand because he set up the National Mystery Writer awards called the Ngaio Marsh Awards, and so I thought, oh, ‘she’s having a little joke here.’
Liz Nugent: Yes. there’s a few names that are dropped in here and there, but that was a little homage to Craig because he was so brilliant organizing that tour for me.
He designed posters and put me in touch with libraries and bookstores and readers and other Kiwi writers. That was great.
I was interviewed by, by New Zealand writers when I did those events. It was really nice, really good.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely and I do get a feeling just from that you might also enjoy black humor.
We won’t explain why, but there’s a teddy bear that features in the story and right at the very end, there is a very nice touch with the teddy bear that left me smiling and thinking you really do seem to have quite a sense of underlying black humor.
Would that be right?
Maintaining humour in the drakness
Liz Nugent: There’s a lot of very dark because the story is so dark.
There’s one aspect of the story that is very dark. Sally, who dominates the story, people laugh at her and she is not comfortable with that. Who would be?
But she also has a really good sense of humor herself, and she voices the kind of things… She’s like me without a filter.
She says things that you shouldn’t say to people.
She gets herself into really awkward situations a lot.
I like to play with that. There’s one scene when like the really monstrous character goes to London and it’s at the height of the IRA campaign and when somebody hears his Irish accent, they accuse him of being an IRA member and he’s absolutely,
Astounded and shocked and horrified that somebody should call him or should think that he was a terrorist, when in fact he is a worse terrorist on the domestic front than any IRA bomber ever was.
Like, he is such a monster. I had a lot of fun with putting some humor in among the darkness because you can’t write something relentlessly grim.
You have to even it out, balance it out with some humor.
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Sally’s atypical character built from trauma
I tried to do that as much as I could. I had fun with some of the characters, because some of the characters themselves were quite funny.
And I think with Sally as well, because she sees everything in black and white.
She accepts everything that is told to her and she accepts everything that’s presented to her.
She doesn’t really question things so she doesn’t see things like social class or racial markers, she doesn’t see why there should be a difference between black people and white people.
And of course she’s right, but it was really interesting to play with that, for somebody who actually doesn’t see any difference.
It’s just not there for her. She just thinks humans are humans, which is true and it’s what we should all think, but unfortunately, racism does rear its head, and racism, especially in a small white Irish town.
Sally is the only person who’s really able to tackle it head on.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Talking about that kind of underlying humor, the scenes where Peter is taking care of someone in New Zealand and you get his inner dialogue where he’s justifying all the things that he is doing for this person.
Without giving anything away, you can’t help smiling about the way that he’s framed it all in such positive terms when it’s really a very dark thing that’s happening.
Three brothers at a funeral… one of them in the coffin
Liz Nugent: I know exactly what you mean. There’s a lot of that kind of humor. He honestly believes it though. He thinks because he’s not his father, he’s determined that he’s a very different type of man to his father.
Once he’s realized for his father, but it’s taken him way too long to discover the truth about his father.
He should have known all along, but because he’s been so isolated and, cut off from society, he actually doesn’t know until. It’s really way too late to save a certain.
Jenny Wheeler: The book before this one. Our Little Cruelties, which I think. The New York Times described as one of the Best Thrillers of 2020, it’s also got a page turning tagline.
It’s starts with three brothers are at a funeral. One of them lies in the coffin and we know right from the start that there’s been a murder as well.
It takes us until pretty well the end of the book to discover who the one is in the coffin and how he got there. How do you come up with these amazing situations?
Liz Nugent: I generally just start with the first line.
I mean that line, “There were three brothers at the Drumm funeral. One of us was in a coffin.”
That just came to me and I didn’t know who was dead or who had killed him until I got to that final point in the book.
I took little snapshots of their lives to show their relationships.
Character-driven plotting keeps surprising
I wanted to build up a rivalry between these three brothers, up to a point where each of them would have a good reason to kill one or both of the others so that it was as unpredictable as possible as to who was actually going to be dead and as unpredictable as possible as to who had killed him.
I like to surprise myself. In Strange Sally Diamond, I don’t think there’s much that’s guessable about the book.. There’s a few things where I try and throw the reader off course.
There’s a new neighbor who arrives into the village who takes an unhealthy interest in Sally.
And you might think it’s one character and it turns out to be a different kind of a character altogether.
I play with expectations every time I see something that, where the next step is obvious, I try to find a way for that not to be the next step taken.
I try to put obstacles in the way of that happening so that the character has to go and do something else.
Jenny Wheeler: I guess that truly is character driven plotting, isn’t it?
Liz Nugent: Yes. It’s the first line which determines what kind of character we’re dealing with.
Like that opening paragraph tells you that Sally is atypical. And in the one about the brothers, we know that this is not a healthy brother’s relationship.
The first line of Lying In Wait is my husband Did not mean to kill Annie Doyle but the lying tramp deserved it.
The long process of getting books to screen
Liz Nugent’s Lying in Wait – currently optioned for screen
Like all of the books have some setup that, that raises questions and I mightn’t answer those questions until the very end of the book, or I might answer them halfway through, but I then play out the consequences of the actions and the attitudes afterwards.
Jenny Wheeler: I know that one of your books has been optioned for screen. I read that somewhere, but they all are really absolute ringers to be movies or TV series, but has anything much happened on that front?
Liz Nugent: Oh, everything. It’s just one of those things, and I think it happens a lot to writers. Things get optioned all the time and. Leonardo DiCaprio’s, production company optioned, Unraveling Oliver, and renewed the option three or four years in a row and then dropped it.
And so that’s up for grabs again and Lying In Wait is currently optioned by an Irish production company.
Strange. Sally Diamond is being sent out around now by my agents in Los Angeles, c a a, uh, sent out to.
All the streamers are having a look and been a lot of interest. They’ve all been optioned and then the options have dropped.
I used to get my hopes up and I used to get really excited that something amazing was going to happen, especially when they were throwing names like Leonardo DiCaprio is going do it and Kate Blanchett is going to play Lydia.
What Liz Nugent is reading right now
All these names are being thrown about and you get very excited, but then nothing happens.
Like really, nothing happens and every time the option gets renewed you get a, a chunk of money, which is nice.
But at the same time, I’d rather they just made the damn thing because I’d like people to see it. I’d like to see it come to the screen.
I’m not sure that I’d like to be involved in, in, in the writing of it. That’s another question, but at least please, somebody makes something of mine.
They’re all there. Although all the books are there. Lying The Wait is the only one that is currently up.
Oh, sorry, no. Skin Deep, too. Somebody has just put the option for Skin Deep as well, the third one. Skin Deep and Lying Wait have been optioned and the other three are available.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fabulous. We are starting to run out of time and we always do like to ask our authors about their reading habits.
I did pick up that you in particular, admired one of your fellow Irish novelists, Maeve Binchy, and so I thought, could you tell us a bit about your reading tastes, what you’re reading at the moment, and your feelings about Maeve?
Liz Nugent: Well, funny enough, I read a lot of Maeve Binchy when I was a teenager. But I think the connection is that she went to the same school as I did, and I feel she left some of her DNA on her desk. I picked it up. I was able to run with it I’m only the second writer that that school has produced.
It’s a small enough school, I guess, but I like to think that there’s some connection there.
I loved her, her stories of Irish life and the small village scenarios and young women immigrating in the 1950s, which of course happened again the 1980s, when I was a, a teenager, a late teenager.
I ended up going to London and having the kind of adventures that she wrote about. So yes, a first fondness for Maeve Binchy and the person who takes over. I’m sorry, I’ve gone blank.
Maeve Binchy and Marian Keyes
Jenny Wheeler: You mean who’s followed in her footsteps?
Liz Nugent: Yes. The writer who would’ve followed in Maeve Binchy’s footsteps is Marian Keys, who is hugely popular and has hold sold like 40 million books all over the world, and is translated into, you know, 50 languages.
And Marian happens to be a neighbor and a very good friend. I’m very lucky to have that friendship and, much as I love Maeve, I never actually met her, which I’m really sad about.
Any radio interviews I heard of her, she was just such a force of nature and so generous to other writers like me.
The other writers who knew her all talk about how generous she was to them and how she really set the tone for Irish writers to be generous to each other and to support each other as much as possible. And I think we all try to do that.
Jenny Wheeler: And as for what you’re reading at the moment?
Liz Nugent: What am I reading at the moment?
I’m reading a book by Sarah Hilary, uh, an English writer. I can’t think of the name of it off the top of my head, but it’s a proof. I, I’m reading wall to wall proofs. I got sent about oh seven or eight proofs every week. And you know, I try to, I try to read as many as I can. Um, I’ve read, um, Vanda Simon’s new book and I’ve read Paul Cleave’s new book and I’ve read Fiona Sussman’s new book.
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The gradual rise of ‘books written for women”
Maeve Binchy – books written for women gradually coming into their own
You guys aren’t doing too badly, I have to say. They were all excellent, really excellent. I’m trying to think who else I have read from your end of the planet. Oh, Dame Fiona Kidman, who I met and adored when I met her in in Dunedin. She’s fantastic and she’s such a trailblazer and such a nice lady, and so funny and entertaining.
You know, for a lady of her age, she’s fantastic. Another force of nature. I loved her.
Jenny Wheeler: Lovely, Liz. Thank you. I imagine that having Maeve Binchy in just in your world perhaps helped you to realize that it was possible for a girl from your school to become an international writer. Maybe it was an aspirational thing that was set there for you.
Liz Nugent: Funnily enough, I didn’t know that she went to my school until I was about, I’d say, 15 years ago.
I had no idea, because I think, Light A Penny Candle, her first book was published maybe in 1985, which is the year I left school or maybe the year before. But I don’t remember any mention of her when I was in school.
Maybe the school thought that her writing was too low brow for them. Because for Maeve, like Marion Keyes too, and like Australian writer, Monica McInerney, they have to battle to win respect because they’re writing books that are “written for women.”
And because of that, men tend to put them down or dismiss them as, candy floss fiction, where in fact they’re telling very real stories about very real lives and very real women with very real issues.
How Liz Nugent discovered popular fiction
It’s possible that Maeve Binchy was not respected at the time. She certainly was towards the end of her life, but she was passed over. I don’t think, I don’t recall her ever win winning any major literary awards in Ireland.
Certainly not in the first years of her publishing. Maybe later,
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, genre fiction is coming into its own a little bit more in recent years, maybe because of streaming TV.
The storytelling has slightly changed, but for many years, genre fiction was very much regarded as second rate, wasn’t it?
Liz Nugent: It was, but I think it’s really now, if you have a romance writer who writes really well, or you’re a crime writer who writes really well, or a science fiction writer who writes really well?
You can get literary and crime in the same book. You can get literary and romance in the same book.
Literary fiction on its own can be quite dry and arid regarding plot, often it’s male naval gazing, if
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Yes
Liz Nugent: I’ve read a lot of literary fiction. In fact, to my shame, I didn’t read a lot of crime before I wrote my first book, so it was only when it was shortlisted for that crime award that I read all of the other.nominees.
And realized, holy crap, I have missed out on so much tremendously good writing, because I’ve dismissed this genre because the books that were coming to my attention, the books that won the prizes were all books written by middle-aged white men, and they were the only ones I heard about.
Discovering literary crime novels
The Secret History by Donna Tartt – part of Liz Nugent’s discovery’ of crime fiction
I naturally gravitated towards them, and then I discover, oh my God, I’ve missed out on these brilliant writers and, and then when I look back at the books that I did read, you know, like the Secret History by Donna Tartt. I think to myself, that’s actually a crime novel or the Book of Evidence by John Banville who won the Booker Prize.
And I’m thinking that’s actually a crime novel.
They’re literary crime novels, but they’re crime novels nonetheless. That fascinates me.
Jenny Wheeler: What is next for Liz, the author in the next 12 months? What do you have on your desk?
Liz Nugent: I have the first line of my next book. I haven’t got a second line yet.
I have worked, I have worked at it, in my head, I have worked out probably the first 20,000 words.
I know the scenario. I know who the character is., I don’t know what’s going to happen after that, but it’ll become apparent when I begin to write it, and so I will be writing certainly the first 20,000 words over the next couple of months.
I’m doing a lot of traveling, an awful lot of traveling. I’m going to a festival in the Hamptons in Long Island, in in America. In two weeks time,
I am going to a lot of festivals in the UK and Ireland. I’m not getting to the Southern Hemisphere this year, but Iceland is on the cards.
There’s lots of crime festivals, all. Over, you know, all over the world. I was in Poland and Germany and all over. I’ve traveled a lot, but, I hope to get back to New Zealand sometime.
Where you can find Liz Nugent online
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. And do you enjoy interacting with your readers, and where can they find you online?
Liz Nugent: Oh, I’m on Twitter at Lizzy NuGen Eli, IE. Nugent at Lizzy Nugent. Um, on Facebook, Liz Nugent.
Um, I have my blue tick on Twitter. I think that might be taken away and I’m certainly not paying. Elon Musk. S
I have it for now, but that might disappear. I’m on Instagram, but I’m useless on Instagram.
I’m not quite sure how to use it, but I’m at Liz Nugent, writer on Instagram, and yeah, I don’t do TikTok.
I’m just too old to learn another thing. I think Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are as much as I can do.
But, you know, I hope that book Talk TikTok finds me, because apparently they’re, they’re very, very influential.
So it’d be great if they could find me because I happen to hope of finding them Old head new tricks,
Jenny Wheeler: Look. That’s wonderful. Liz. Look, thank you so much for your time, and just before we go, all of those. Uh, links that you’ve mentioned will be in the show notes for this episode on our website that joys have binge reading.com, so you’ll be able to follow them up there. But thanks so much, Liz. It’s been wonderful talking.
Liz Nugent: Thank you. Thank you so much.
If you enjoyed Liz Nugent you might also enjoy…
Scottish thriller writer Douglas Skelton and his Rebecca Connolly series…
Douglas Skeleton is one of Scotland’s most celebrated crime writers with dark stories that meld history and contemporary life stretching from the tough streets of his hometown of Glasgow to the wildness of the Scottish Highlands.
We’re talking Where Demons Hide, Douglas’s latest thriller with a supernatural edge, featuring crime reporter, Rebecca Connolly.
Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler. And in today’s Binge Reading, Rebecca’s skepticism is challenged after a body is found on a lonely moor in the center of a pentagram. A woman has been frightened to death.
But was she killed by supernatural means or is there a more down to earth explanation?
LISTEN TO DOUGLAS
Next time on Binge Reading – Carol Drinkwater
Next time Carol Drinkwater, the beloved actress of the All Creatures Great And Small TV show. Now a very well selling novelist and nonfiction writer, and her latest book, An Act Of Love, a sweeping and evocative World War II love story set in the French Alps,
Forced to flee war ravaged, Poland, 17 year old Sierra and her parents find refuge in a dilapidated house high in the French helps.
But soon the Nazis close in, casting a long shadow that will force them to make some hard choices.
That’s next time, An Act Of Love, from Carol Drinkwater.
That’s it for today. Just a reminder before I go, if you enjoy the show, please leave us a review or a comment somewhere so others will find us too. Happy reading and see you next time.