Monday, August 15, 2011

Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson

I picked this up because it looked intriguing to me and boy, was it fantastic.  In this novel, Christine is a middle-aged woman who has a bizarre form of amnesia.  She cannot remember anything from day to day and whenever she goes to sleep, her memory is wiped clean. Each morning, she wakes up and has no clue who she is, where she is, how old she is or any other bits of knowledge that we take for granted. Imagine having to re-create your entire life history each day that you wake up - that's what she has to go through. She lives with a man named Ben - her husband - and her only way to remember is by reading the journal that she keeps daily.

This is SJ Watson's first novel and I hope that he will continue to write more for us because it was fantastic - a good premise, wonderful writing and great characters. It was a page turner - I found myself constantly thinking about the novel, the characters and what would happen at inopportune moments. I also wondered when the next time that I could sit down to read the novel would be. The book is particularly jarring in the first few pages, but continue on with it - it becomes jarring because you have no idea what is going on and that is what makes the start of the novel and the entire novel itself brilliant - you experience what Christine is actually experiencing on a daily basis. And it is wonderful.  Totally worth it.

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