Sam Brooks reviews the latest novel from one of NZ’s modern crime queens.

It’s 2024, and we’re officially in the era of Covid art. After the deaths, after the lockdowns, after the vaccines, it was sort of inevitable. The entire world went through something, and now the artists have the space, or at least the drive, to respond to it. It’s also obviously not just art that responds to the pandemic, but the fallout from the pandemic. We’re in the era of novels about isolation, novels about inexplicable death, and yes, novels about misinformation.

Look, I’ll be honest: I have found the terms “conspiracy theory”, “misinformation” and even “gaslighting” to be deeply frustrating ones. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s not a theory, it’s not a piece of misinformation, it’s not gaslighting, it’s… a lie. They’re lies, you guys. Dressing them up with more letters and syllables doesn’t make them not lies. It might be easier to accept a lie when it is dressed up otherwise – easier to say a partner was gaslighting, a so-called media organisation is feeding us misinformation, or an unlikely interpretation of reality is a conspiracy theory – but it doesn’t change the fact that all of these are fundamentally just lying.

All of this is to say that Home Truths by Charity Norman (author of the Ngaio Marsh Award-winning novel Remember Me) is a book about lies. It’s about the damage that lies do to person’s brain, and how that damage spirals outwards to cause even more damage. 

Norman throws to a family in Yorkshire for this new novel. Livia and Scott are a happily married couple with two equally happy kids, Heidi and Noah. Scott’s brother, Nicky, requires almost full-time care due to his specific neurodivergence and diabetes. One day, he tragically dies, and his death throws Scott into despair – and a search for answers. Given this is set in 2019, and Scott has access to the internet, that search ends up with him finding, yes, lies.

For the most part, Home Truths plays out less like a thriller and more like an existential horror. What happens when the person you’ve chosen to spend your life with goes down a rabbit hole? What happens when an otherwise right-thinking person starts to engage with the darkest fantasy to exist outside of reality? Norman captures how horrible this must feel, showing us the tragic way that Scott’s most likeable and beautiful qualities – his inquisitive nature, his level of love and care for his family – make him even more susceptible to other people’s ill intentions.

Norman threads a very difficult line here, as she switches perspectives between three members of the family. There’s Livia, the no-nonsense probation officer who has to deal with the worst kind of nonsense thanks to her husband. There’s Heidi, the troubled teen with a secret that she holds more heavily than any teenager should be expected to hold. And finally, there’s Scott, whose heart is broken so open by grief that any conspiracy, any theory, any lie can take root.

Although there are two clear sympathetic perspectives among the three – the new-suffering wife, the burdened teenager – what is impressive is how non-judgemental Norman is of Scott. Even as Scott does some things that might be completely out-the-gate, even illegal, she never condescends. She presents us an all-too-real and all-too-relatable narrative; a good person whose nature is twisted for evil, and I mean genuinely evil, purposes.

Equally impressive is how Norman pitches Livia. It would have be easy for her to present Livia as the naysayer, the eye-rolling skeptic who is so clearly in the right. Instead, Livia has moments of doubts, moments where even she feels tempted by the information Scott is spouting. Why wouldn’t she be? He’s her love, and her partner, and the father of her children. Surely it can’t all be wrong if he believes it. While we’re never afraid she’ll follow him down those pathways, these moments are full of tension, and brilliantly handled by Norman.

There are moments, especially towards the end, where the narrative seems drawn to being dramatically compelling rather than authentic to the real world, or even the logic that Norman has set up. One twist in particular strains belief, if only because the rest of the novel has been relatively down-to-earth and within the realm of real-life logic. Losing a loved one to misinformation is horrifying – and gripping – enough, that we don’t need the stakes artificially heightened.

Norman also walks a very difficult line in depicting the lies that Scott ends up deeply investing in. Some of them read like parodies of these videos – “Why would we be pushing a dangerous substance into the arms of our children, if it isn’t even necessary? Who stands to gain? Give you one guess.” – but that could be my own biases talking. Sometimes the most authentic thing is the most ridiculous thing.

I closed Home Truths thinking of Louise Wallace’s Ash, one of the best novels of the year, and an equally harrowing response to Covid, at least in part. Whereas Ash is more esoteric, more rooted in the world of metaphor and allegory, Home Truths is up front. Covid-19 is a looming spectre in the novel – the reader does not necessarily need to be eagle-eyed to clock what might happen in the interim when we flash back from 2022 to 2019 and trudge slowly forward. It’s not a comfortable read, although Norman never goes full-on nihilistic, but it is an important one that I can imagine, sadly, being too close to too many people’s real life home truths.

Home Truths by Charity Norman ($37, Allen & Unwin NZ) is available to purchase from Unity Books. This review was first published on Sam Brooks’ newsletter, Dramatic Pause.