Liz Nugent

Irish author of darkly compelling psychological thrillers including Lying in Wait, whose unreliable narrators and devastating family secrets have earned her a devoted following.

Liz Nugent is an Irish author who has established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary psychological fiction, winning the Irish Crime Novel of the Year award three times — a record in the award’s history. Her novels are characterized by deeply unreliable narrators, suffocating family dynamics, and a fascination with the psychology of self-deception: her protagonists often believe themselves to be the heroes of their own stories while the reader gradually perceives the horror of what they are actually doing.

Lying in Wait, published in 2016, begins with a confession: a Dublin judge’s wife has just helped her husband kill a young woman, and the novel explores how they dispose of the body and manage the consequences while simultaneously tracing the woman’s disappearance from her family’s perspective. The moral inversion — following sympathetically along with people doing terrible things — is characteristic of Nugent’s approach, and the domestic setting (a wealthy south Dublin family) gives the darkness a particularly suffocating quality.

Nugent worked for decades in Irish theater and broadcasting before publishing her first novel in her late forties, and her understanding of how people perform for each other and for themselves infuses her fiction. Her other novels include Unravelling Oliver (narrated by a man who has just beaten his wife nearly to death, and everyone who knew him) and Strange Sally Diamond. She is not a comfortable read, but she is a supremely accomplished one, with an understanding of psychological abnormality that is both precise and deeply unsettling.