Author and five-time Irish Book Award winner Liz Nugent currently sits atop the bestseller lists with her latest twisty-turny thriller, The Truth About Ruby Cooper.
It's the latest compelling page-turner in a series of smashes that already includes Unravelling Oliver, Lying In Wait, Skin Deep, Our Little Cruelties and Strange Sally Diamond.
She talks to Brendan O'Connor below:
We asked Liz for her choice cultural picks...
FILM
My favourite Irish film of all time will always be Adam and Paul. In equal parts tragic and hilarious, it follows two addicts on a single day as they roam the streets of Dublin looking for their next fix. Inevitably, it is compared to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, but it is a masterpiece all on its own. The combined talents of Lenny Abrahamson, screenwriter/actor Mark O’Halloran and the late Tom Murphy gave us something unforgettable with a devastating ending, just the way I like my endings.
MUSIC
Recommending just one album, artist or band is impossible, but if pushed, I’m going to go with Euro Country by CMAT and her Very Sexy CMAT Band. I think she has bought the fun back into music even when the lyrics often deal with some very dark topics. All her concerts look like the best parties and the songs are great. It’s wonderful to see a band as grounded as they are having an absolute ball on stage or among the audience. They deserve all the success that is coming their way.
BOOK
I could recommend 25 books (I keep a list on my phone) but just for today, I’ll go for The Lost Man by Jane Harper. Set in the hottest part of Australia at the hottest time of year, it tells the story of a man estranged from his family for unspecified reasons who learns that his brother has died in very mysterious circumstances. As well as a brilliantly constructed plot and sharp writing, what intrigued me most was the environment this family were living in, as hostile and deadly as any murderer could be. All of Harper’s books are great but this one stood out.
THEATRE
In 2024, I was in London on a flying visit for book business and found myself with a free evening to myself. Wandering around the West End, I chanced my arm at the box office of the Theatre Royal Haymarket and got the last solo ticket for the one-woman-performance of The Picture of Dorian Gray starring Sarah Snook. It’s unfair to say that it was a one-woman-show really, because she is constantly surrounded by a black-clad crew who change her costume and film her when she is facing upstage, but she does play every single role in the play and sometimes she is interacting with prerecorded scenes of her playing a different role, so there is no room for a fluffed line and her timing had to be exact. I have never seen anything like it in my life. Extraordinary.
TV
I think that Succession might have overtaken Breaking Bad as my favourite show. I hope I wasn’t swayed by the scale of it and the giant budget it must have had (surely they bought the helicopters instead of renting them, because they certainly got the use out of them!) but the story telling, clearly loosely based on the Murdoch family and their media empire was nothing less than Shakespearean. Even the theme tune makes my spine tingle.
There were little moments that went unremarked that told a story of their own, e.g. in the first series when Logan Roy is recovering from his stroke, his wife helps him to get dressed. The keen-eyed will have noticed that his back was covered with old scars. He was clearly whipped as a boy. This is never mentioned but it certainly explains why, in a later series, he cannot wait to get out of Dundee when the family and entourage end up there for a business celebration. His visceral hatred for his hometown is explained on his back.
GIG
The world premiere of Michael Gallen’s opera The Curing Line is taking place during the Kilkenny Arts Festival this year. There is huge excitement about this because it already won the prestigious Fedora International Opera Prize (the world’s largest prize for new opera).
The Curing Line explores themes of healing, loss of culture and environmental collapse through the story of Cora, a young woman who inherits a life-saving ancestral healing power but loses her ability to use it.
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ART
I really want to see the John Minihan exhibition in the Hugh Lane Room of the National Gallery. Most famous perhaps for his photos of Samuel Beckett, his work also can be seen as a social commentary of the last sixty years, particularly chronicling the changing face of Athy, his hometown, and London where he worked as a press photographer for thirty years. There are two exhibitions of his work. The current one runs until July and because photos cannot be displayed for more than a few months without being damaged, the second exhibition runs until November.
RADIO/PODCAST
I avoid podcasts, because I like to see people’s faces when they are chatting so I watch Ryan Tubridy’s Bookshelf on YouTube because I’m always fascinated by what people read.
On the radio, I love Aedín Gormley’s Movies and Musicals on Lyric FM on a Saturday afternoon. Even though I rarely go to the cinema or to see a musical, I love soundtracks because they are often designed to provoke emotion and I can listen to soundtracks while I write.
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TECH
I hate to support any tech billionaire, but I have to say I would be literally lost without Google Maps. Also, you can write a book that’s partially set in Boston without ever having been there (I used street view when writing The Truth About Ruby Cooper).
THE NEXT BIG THING...
I cannot wait to see Marian Keyes’ book Grown Ups get the Netflix treatment. It has a great cast including Adrian Dunbar, Sinead Cusack, Aisling Bea and Sarah Greene. It was shot around Dun Laoghaire and Dalkey as far as I know, as was The Walsh Sisters. No release date yet.
The Truth About Ruby Cooper is published by Penguin Sandycove
