Will, Brian and Luke grow up competing for their mother's unequal love. As men, the competition continues - for status, money, fame, women ...

They each betray each other, over and over, until one of them is dead.

But which brother killed him?

***

‘Brilliantly observed family life and a plot that is part rollercoaster, part maze. Loved it!’ Graham Norton

'Liz Nugent is a force to be reckoned with'

Lisa Jewell

'Liz Nugent has a gift for filling us with a terrible fascination for truly horrible people'

Val McDermid

‘Evocative, vivid, brilliant storytelling from a novelist of powerful gifts’

Joseph O’Connor

‘Dark, beautiful devastating- pure genius’

Lucy Foley

Smart, artful and totally gripping…LOVED IT’

Will Dean

‘Creepy, compelling and totally addictive’

Erin Kelly

‘Shot through with black humour, toxic truths and pathos’

Sarah Hilary

‘Wonderfully tense and gripping….a total page turner.. loved every word of it’

Dame Fiona Kidman

‘Stunning… dark in a subtle way and it really got under my skin like no other book’

Patricia Gibney

“A dark jewel of a novel, fire flickering in its depths and light lining its edges. …no other crime novelist of the past decade has rivaled Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell, or Gillian Flynn. [Little Cruelties is] a tragedy of evil power, crisply written and quickly paced; above all, [it’s] a thriller, swift and exciting and built like a carnival house, all false walls and trapdoors.” - A.J. Finn, New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window

“Artfully constructed… the author’s skillful telling of this multigenerational tragedy has the riveting power of an imminent car crash.” - Publishers Weekly

"[A] chilling tale of the sociopathic mind... Readers who love sinister psychological thrillers will tear through these pages."- "Library Journal (starred review)"

“..The cruelties the three Drumm brothers inflict on one another include lying, bullying, stealing, seducing one another’s girlfriends and, finally, murder…..a fascinating reminder that no story is complete unless you hear it from everyone involved. “Little Cruelties” shows how thoroughly families can mess one another up, and how sometimes the greatest mysteries are found within the psyche.- New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/25/books/gifts-for-book-lovers.html

“The much-decorated writer again displays a flair for plot and an uncanny ability to get under the skin of characters in the dysfunctional family drama … Nugent builds her narrative skilfully, with the ellipses in each brother’s account gradually filled in by the ensuing tales. All their psychologies are incisively laid out, consistent and layered across all sections … nobody is a mere cliché in Nugent’s clear, propulsive writing, and the author masterfully unveils the damage and hurt behind every motivation, and the petty resentments, delusions and carelessness that lie behind every nick and cut the family members inflict upon one another over the four decades of her tale … Nugent has won four Irish Book Awards for her previous three novels; it would be a cruelty to deny her further honours for her fourth.”

Crimereads.com novels of the month, November 2020