Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson, Text Publishing, $32.95.
Every morning, Christine wakes in an unfamiliar bedroom next to a man she doesn’t recognise, with no idea how she got there. Alarmed, ashamed — she can see his wife’s clothes — she goes to the mirror and sees a woman 25 years older than herself staring back.
She starts to panic, then sees a photograph of herself with the stranger in the bed. “Your husband”, it says. But is he? She simply can’t remember.
This cracking debut novel takes the popular theme of memory loss and weaves it into a psychological thriller so tight and tense it’s almost impossible to put down.
You won’t thank me for telling too much of the plot, but essentially it involves a long-ago “accident” which causes the events and discoveries of each new day to be wiped from Christine’s memory during sleep — until she starts a journal, which bit by bit challenges everything she is being told. Better read it before the Ridley Scott film comes out later this year.
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