📖 Publication Day Book Review ~ The Truth about Ruby Cooper by Liz Nugent

Penguin
12 March 2026

My thanks to the publisher for my copy of this book

 

If my sister hadn’t been beautiful, none of it would have happened.

Ruby Cooper and her sister, Erin, live an idyllic life in their close-knit church community in Boston. But when Ruby is sixteen, she is involved in an incident that causes her family’s world to implode.

Across decades, the fallout leaves a wake of destruction behind Ruby in Dublin and Erin in Boston.

Not that Ruby wants to think about the past.

But it can’t stay a secret forever.

📖 My Review.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave comes to mind when reading this complex story of toxic jealousy and the hopeless ruination of multiple lives. 

Ruby Cooper is just sixteen when an incident ruins her life and that of her family. What then follows are years of recrimination with Ruby at the centre of everything that goes wrong for the Cooper family. Moving seamlessly between life in Boston and Ireland and with vignettes from Ruby and her older sister Erin we start to get drawn into a tragic family drama which has so many twists, turns and elements of self destructive behaviour that it soon becomes difficult to reconcile just how toxic life can become when you lose hope and sanity. Cleverly written, as all this author’s novels undoubtedly are, this story has something of a different approach which is no less powerful than her previous stories.

The Truth about Ruby Cooper is an emotional, multilayered story with a depth of feeling which kept my attention throughout. There were times when I couldn’t believe that someone could act in such a destructive manner so as to cause immense psychological pain but such is the strength of the writing that I even started to feel moments of empathy with a character I came to loathe. Beautifully written from start to finish, I hung onto every word and closed the book with the satisfaction that comes from reading a good story, well told.

🫖 Best read with…a restorative cup of tea 

About the Author

Before becoming a full-time writer, Liz Nugent worked in film, theatre and television. Her four novels - Unravelling Oliver, Lying in Wait, Skin Deep and Our Little Cruelties have each been Number One bestsellers and she has won four Irish Book Awards, as well as the James Joyce Medal for Literature. She lives in Dublin.

Twitter #LizNugent #TheTruthAboutRubyCooper

Website

@PenguinUKBooks