Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2011 : Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel by S.J. Watson

Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel [Hardcover]

By

S. J. Watson

"As I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today. I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning. Thinking I’m still a child. Thinking I have a whole lifetime of choice ahead of me. . . ."

Memories define us.

So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep?

Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love—all forgotten overnight.

And the one person you trust may be telling you only half the story.

Welcome to Christine's life.

Every day Christine wakes up not knowing where she is. Her memories disappear every time she falls asleep.

Her husband, Ben, is a stranger to her, and he's obligated to explain their life together on a daily basis--all the result of a mysterious accident that made Christine an amnesiac.

With the encouragement of her doctor, Christine starts a journal to help jog her memory every day. One morning, she opens it and sees that she's written three unexpected and terrifying words: "Don't trust Ben."

Suddenly everything her husband has told her falls under suspicion. What kind of accident caused her condition?

Who can she trust? Why is Ben lying to her? And, for the reader: Can Christine’s story be trusted?

At the heart of S. J. Watson's Before I Go To Sleep is the petrifying question: How can anyone function when they can't even trust themselves?

Suspenseful from start to finish, the strength of Watson's writing allows Before I Go to Sleep to transcend the basic premise and present profound questions about memory and identity.

One of the best debut literary thrillers in recent years, Before I Go to Sleep deserves to be one of the major blockbusters of the summer. --Miriam Landis


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Review

This is one of those books that you open just to glance at the first page and see whether you will like it only to discover yourself five hours later still glued to the book, desperate to find out what happens next. Writing a novel whose main character and narrator suffers from amnesia and doesn't remember most of her life when she wakes up in the morning carries a risk of creating a book that is repetitive. S. J. Watson, however, made Before I Go to Sleep so fascinating, full of surprises, mysteries and revelations that there isn't a single boring page in the entire novel.

Christine, the main character of Before I Go to Sleep, wakes up one morning only to realize that she recognizes neither the man who sleeps next to her nor the house she is in. Even her body is alien to her because her most recent memory is that of being a twenty-year-old student and now she is a woman in her forties. Christine discovers that she lost her memory many years ago and now has to find out who she is anew every single morning of her life. When she finds a diary she has been keeping to remind herself of what she has been doing every day, Christine begins a complex and painful journey to self-discovery.

Before I Go to Sleep is not only a fascinating suspense thriller. It also makes you think about what constitutes the nature of human identity. What makes our personalities? What are we without our memories? How does one go about reconstructing a life that has been shattered by a horrible tragedy that has robbed you of everything you cherished and lived for?

The novel is so professionally structured and so meticulously plotted that I was really surprised to find out that Before I Go to Sleep is S.J. Watson's debut novel. I am extremely glad that I discovered this promising new writer through the Amazon Vine program and will now be eagerly awaiting new books from him. If you like psychological suspense novels, make sure you get this book. It is masterfully written and very believable. I visited the author's website and learned that movie rights to the book have been acquired and the filming will start this year. That is one movie I will definitely be watching.

Reviewed by: Olga Bezhanova (Edwardsville, IL)

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About the author

S. J. Watson lives in London and worked in the National Health Service for a number of years. In 2009 Watson was accepted into the first Faber Academy Writing a Novel course, a rigorous and selective program that covers all aspects of the novel-writing process. Before I Go to Sleep is the result.


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