A debut novel by Australian writer Diana Reed, Signs of Damage mines familiar, rich novelistic territory in exploring family dynamics and the mysteries of the past. When a family head dies, the funeral prompts his wife, two daughters, and various others to look back to a family holiday a decade and a half earlier in a French villa, when a visitor went missing for hours. The burden of epileptic seizures is explored with nuance. Jumping back and forth between present and past is handled deftly, and the characters hold great potential, but the plot labours the various unfolding secrets and the voice of the narrator lurches between people who sound much like each other.
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