Review: The Centre, by Hannah Tunnicliffe

The opening scene of The Centre feels straight out of The White Lotus: a body found floating in the sea near the grounds of the exclusive Centre for Personal Excellence. The Centre is Hannah Tunnicliffe’s fifth adult novel and follows her successful 2024 domestic thriller The Pool.

The Centre is ‘a huge estate, white and multi-tiered like an elaborate wedding cake.’ Run by the enigmatic Portia and Nico Gideon, the environment and its inhabitants exude wealth and exclusivity. ‘Seekers’ float about, dressed in loose linen or silk, while being served a restrictive diet of ‘raw sliced things’. In the pursuit of personal development, the Centre offers a web of accelerated programmes, tier levels, and secret groups for the truly committed.

Annie, jobless and freshly dumped by her boyfriend, arrives on her sister Clover’s doorstep. Clover is Annie’s best friend and almost her only family; they survived their tragic childhood through the strength of their bond. Clover hears about the Centre from a wellness influencer, Lumelia, and the sisters attend an introductory event together. Soon, Clover becomes increasingly swept up in the Centre’s teachings, spending more and more time there and rapidly losing weight. The sisters argue, Clover disappears, and for the first time, Annie fears she’s losing her.

Annie also becomes complicit in the wellness industry, agreeing to ‘sell snake oil’ as a writer for a health magazine. ‘There are a lot of personalities to appeal to. People who might get all itchy about eating a spoonful of sugar or red food dye but will quite happily inject a neurotoxic protein into their foreheads or eat a bar full of non-digestible fats.’

Meanwhile, Lumelia’s influencer career is taking off, built around her weight loss and spiritual ‘transformation’. Entering a collaboration with the Centre, she draws her followers into its ranks. Lumelia is familiar with the inner workings of cults and coercive control, having grown up in a religious sect in New Zealand, where ‘Parents owned children, men owned women, the Elders owned the lot of us.’ Lumelia escaped the sect decades ago, so it is a bittersweet surprise when her estranged brother arrives in Sydney, sent by the Elders to silence her testimonies. Lumelia no longer subscribes to the indoctrination of her upbringing—though nor does she seem to truly believe the poetic notions of harmonious alignment and self- restoration she preaches to her followers.

The novel explores the intersections between the burgeoning wellness industry, influencer culture, MLMs, grifts, and cults. The Centre for Personal Excellence draws in the broken, the beautiful, the desperate. ‘The teachings do more good the less you can afford them’, followers are told. ‘If you want to find the money, you can find the money, right? If it’s important to you. If you are important to you.’

Tunnicliffe’s examination of wellness culture, social media and coercive control feels particularly pertinent. We live in an age in which almost anything can be turned into a belief system, a personal brand, or a business opportunity, and where insecurities are manufactured so solutions can be sold (dermaplaning, anyone?) Ideas become increasingly extreme in the competition for attention, just as social media algorithms reward novelty and ever more outlandish claims. Whether it's wellness trends, conspiracy theories or movements like the manosphere, those peddling the snake oil don’t necessarily buy what they’re selling, but they are profiting from it. But these movements also offer something to people who might be feeling lost or vulnerable: a sense of community and belonging. The Centre captures how the guise of self-improvement and empowerment can become a tool for manipulation.

For the most part, Tunnicliffe’s writing is accessible and flows easily, but occasionally, metaphors overreach, pulling us out of the moment. Annie’s ex-boyfriend’s confidence, for example, is awkwardly described as being ‘airborne, and it seemed to spray all over everything and everyone’. Similarly obscure, Clover's voice is described as ‘a warm and open palm. A gold coin discovered on the footpath.’ What Tunnicliffe does well is pull us through multiple viewpoints in an engaging, plot-driven narrative. Fans of Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers will recognise familiar territory, particularly in the collision of wellness culture, wealthy gurus and dark secrets. But beneath the entertaining surface is a sharper warning about the toxicity of the wellness industry, the powerful pull of belonging, and the dangers of unsubstantiated belief and false prophets.