"Before I go to sleep" by S J Watson

 Following brain damage, when she wakes up Christine has forgotten everything that happened yesterday. She wakes up beside a man she doesn't recognise, in a house she has no memory of. Each day she has to find out who she is. And then tomorrow do it all again.

It makes her massively vulnerable to manipulation. How can she believe the person who tells her he is her husband? Who can she trust?

Recently she has started undergoing treatment which involves the writing of a journal so that she can read about what happened yesterday and write about today and slowly build an understanding of her life. 

This is the premise of an original thriller. The book is brilliant where it explores the distress of such a condition and the fear and anxiety it inevitably provokes. It means that Christine is a very unreliable narrator, full of self-doubt, who can only slowly disentangle the threads of her own history. 

The book is formally a frame narrative with 'today' sandwiching 'the journal'.

My biggest problem with this book was the detail of the journal. Where things were being narrated as they happened, they were presented as Christine's stream of consciousness. But there was no real difference when it came to the journal entries. They were incredibly detailed for journal entries, including conversations reported verbatim, and we were being asked to believe that Christine was writing the journal while hiding that fact from her husband. I understood why this device was necessary to tell the story but, for me, it undermined verisimilitude.

It was a clever thriller, with a classic four part structure, although I predicted the twist at the end. But it had the potential to be much more than a thriller and when it drilled down into the reality of a life without memory, and the emotions that brought up, it became so much better than a normal book.

Some of my favourite moments included: 

• "He looked to be the sort that would develop a paunch. For now, though, he was young, and age had hardly touched him." 
• "Is it possible to both want and not want something at the same time? For desire to ride with fear?" 
• "Men always say I love you as a question." 
• "My husband was earning the money to pay for the clothes and underwear I was wearing for someone other than him."

January 2021; 368 pages 

This review was written
by the author of Motherdarling