Imagine waking up in the morning in an unfamiliar house, in a bed you don’t recognise, next to a stranger. A stranger who explains to you that he is your husband, that this is in fact your house and that you go through this routine every morning, because you are suffering from anterograde amnesia.
That is exactly the situation Christine Lucas, the main character of S.J. Watson’s best-selling novel Before I Go To Sleep finds herself in. Her husband Ben tells her that she was in a car accident about 10 years prior and that ever since then she doesn’t remember that occurred after her late twenties. Struggling with the situation, Christine still tries to make the best of it. When Ben leaves her alone to go to work she is contacted by a Dr. Nash, who claims that he has been working with her for the past few weeks to regain her memory without telling her husband. He also hands her a journal she has been keeping, trying to remember. Dr. Nash is also the one to tell her that she was not in fact in a car accident, but that she was attacked at a hotel near the airport and that’s what caused the trauma for her amnesia.
Working through her journal Christine starts to remember snippets here and there from her former life. She also remembers a son. Ben tells her that they had one but that he had died as a child. While Christine doesn’t really have a reason to mistrust her husband there are more and more things that don’t add up with what she remembers and what she is told by former friends and soon she is not sure who she can trust anymore and who even is who they claim to be.
What starts as a interesting story of a woman trying to manage life in her condition and trying to regain her memory soon turns into an extremely suspenseful thriller that keeps you at the edge of your seat.
Like I think I have already said in earlier posts I am usually not really that much into reading thrillers, so that makes it even better when I find one once and again that really blows me away.
There is also a movie version of the book, starring Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth and Mark Strong. While I am not really a Kidman fan I have to say that the movie is also really worth watching and I enjoyed it a lot, even though I already knew how it would end 😉
