Book: Summer Lies Bleeding

NUALA Casey’s second novel is a taut thriller set in London. It centres on four characters during the summer of 2012: Stella Blake, a young woman pursuing a doctorate in English literature who feels trapped in her relationship; Sebastian Bailey, an artist and a father; Mark Davis, a northerner about to avenge his sister’s brutal murder; and financial analyst Kerstin Engel, an arithmomaniac battling obsessive compulsive disorder.

As summer wanes, these four are slowly drawn together with tragic results.

Their connections, while unlikely, are carefully constructed by Casey.

The story is thus propelled less by chance than by inevitability in a realistic, lived-in London that is by turns gritty and glorious. The city is a material presence that informs the characters’ actions at each precisely mapped-out turn. It is almost a character.

On graduating from Durham University, in 2001, Casey moved to London to pursue a career in music. Yet living in Soho, where she chronicled the comings and goings of the artists and dreamers around her, took her life in a different direction.

She worked as a copywriter, before undertaking a postgraduate creative writing degree. Her debut novel, Soho, 4am, an ensemble piece set on the eve of the 2005 London bombings, was published last year. Though Summer Lies Bleeding is a standalone work, it picks up threads from Soho, 4am. In that book Stella, like Casey herself, was a wannabe singer-songwriter and Sebastian was a struggling art student.

Both have now settled into new, seemingly successful lives, but dissatisfaction lies just beneath the surface.

This disparity between appearances and actuality lies at the heart of the novel. It is what tears these characters apart, even if it requires the sudden appearance of an external force, in this case Mark’s loaded arrival from Middlesbrough, to bring this powerful contrast into the light.

That said, it is Kerstin who best personifies the conflict between inner and outer lives. She is good at her job, yes, but the detrimental effects of her condition outweigh the advantages.

She counts constantly. Everything, from days to steps. Though, thankfully, Casey eschews the pop-cultural trend of granting preternatural insight to people afflicted by OCD.

Kerstin’s calm, professional appearance is a mask. She is a sufferer and, arguably, she suffers more so than the other characters.

“Panic has driven her on, like some kind of weird drug pushing her towards an invisible finishing line,” we are told.

Again and again, Kerstin is confronted by grotesque distortions of everyday challenges, but Casey is does not sensationalise in her depiction of Kerstin’s ailment. Instead, the character serves a crucial purpose.

Her social shortcomings contrast with the hollow interconnectedness of Stella, Sebastian, and Mark, while her painful awareness of her condition flags the others’ inability to face their own destructive problems.

Stylish and well-paced, Summer Lies Bleeding displays a healthy authorial respect for the reader’s credulity, which is balanced by Casey’s willingness to shock as necessary.

Though Casey’s dialogue can occasionally come across as awkward (Stella’s meeting with her academic mentor is a case in point), her functional prose is largely of benefit to both her characters — each furnished with a satisfying backstory and convincing interiority — and to her rich renderings of London.

It grants Summer Lies Bleeding a no-fuss attitude and this, in turn, only heightens the impact of the novel’s violent denouement.