Liz Nugent on Marian Keyes and why all her books are whydunits

Ihope it doesn’t surprise you that Liz Nugent, author of the most striking and exquisite sociopaths and murderers in books like Our Little Cruelties, Skin Deep and Lying In Wait is, in real life, a thoroughly wonderful human being.

We’ve been friends for a while — Unravelling Oliver was the very first Rick O’Shea Book Club Book of the Month when I opened the doors in 2014.

She, like me, is always someone who has a book to recommend when you need one. I started by asking her if she had anything brand new for me. She did: The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard.

I was at a book festival in Vancouver in October and the Simon and Schuster authors (I’m published by them in North America) were taken out for dinner. I got talking to a new guy on the block who had written his first novel. He said “well, it’s kind of speculative fiction”. I nearly shut down at that stage because I just can’t be doing with it. But then he told me the story.

It’s set in a valley and the people who live in it are all self-contained — there’s a police state. People’s ambition is to get on to the council because these are the highest, most important jobs. The valley to the left is 20 years ahead and the valley to the right is 20 years behind. You’ve got three parallel timelines with the same people older or younger, but you can get permission from the council to move from one valley to the other. If you want to visit a loved one that has died, for instance. The central character is a girl called Odile and just after she passes the council exam, she spots people in dark masks. They are visitors from another valley watching a friend of hers. She immediately knows that her friend isn’t going to make it to the next valley.

The concept of time is played with in a really imaginative way. The writing is exquisite. I think this is the literary fiction debut of the year from the ones I’ve read. It’s an extraordinary book.

That sounds just up my street. You’ve also picked one that’s a touchstone for so many Irish authors — Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes.

It was at a time in my life when I didn’t see people like me or my friends being reflected. We read the book and just thought “my god, she’s got us. She’s got our generation doing the mad things”. It captured that zeitgeist in the ’80s and ’90s when we were all just making it up as we went along. It’s about an addict who finds it very hard to accept her addiction and winds up in a rehab unit convinced that it’s actually a spa. Then she suddenly discovers this is a lean, mean rehab centre where you’re deprived of all your possessions, and you have to go through this system. (Actually, in the book, I’m writing at the moment, there’s a rehab centre that features so I have to try and make it as different from Marian’s as possible!)

It’s just so joyous because you see her slow recovery and her reaction to her fellow addicts changing as she goes along. The people she laughs at in the beginning then become solid friends and mentors to her. It’s just really funny and smart and bright and represents my generation perfectly.

I’ve heard you talk about your final choice before — Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (translated by John E Woods). Why is it so important to you?

Because it’s a whydunit. We know who the serial killer is from the moment we meet him. It’s set in 17th century France before the revolution; Grenouille, the central character, is born under a fish stand where his mother is the fishmonger. She goes into labour, lies down under the bench to give birth, pulls out the umbilical cord and placenta, and then gets on with selling fish because that’s her day.

She abandons him to an orphanage where he’s treated terribly, but he has this extraordinary sense of smell. He apprentices himself to a perfumier and is walking through the street one day when he passes this beautiful young woman. He smells her and the beauty of her natural scent overwhelms him. So, he sets about trying to capture the scent of beautiful women by, first of all, murdering them, then embalming them with sensual oils that he has learned in his work as a perfumier, and distilling their scent down into a tiny little bottle. It’s really gruesome, but it’s told in such a beautiful way. It’s probably one of the reasons why all of my books are whydunits rather than whodunits because we know who, but we don’t know why, and whydunits are the books that I’m most interested in.

Liz’s most recent book is the wonderful Strange Sally Diamond. It is, in my opinion, her best book so far and is out in a new paperback edition.