Conville & Walsh

An NHS worker’s dreams of becoming a published author have come true with deals concluded for his first novel, BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP, in eight countries with ongoing auctions in four more.

S J Watson, who is 39, was one of the first pupils on the Faber Academy Creative Writing Course, established in September 2008, his tutors being Richard Skinner and Louise Doughty. Clare Conville signed him up in January of this year and then worked with him on several more drafts of the book before submitting the novel to UK publishers two weeks ago. Since then Conville and Walsh have done deals for BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP in the UK (Transworld), the US (HarperCollins), Canada (HarperCollins), Australia (Text) and in France, the Netherlands, Brazil and Poland - for significant sums. There are ongoing auctions in Greece, Spain, Germany, Italy with deals pending in Israel, Norway and Denmark and interest from the rest of Europe, Russia and the far east.

S J Watson said:

“I had always wanted to write a novel and it was a big risk for me to quit my job as deputy head of a big NHS department to do so. My income halved overnight and there were times when I worried whether I was doing the right thing - but within a week of handing in my notice I saw the advertisement for the first Faber Academy ‘Writing a Novel’ course. Being selected from the hundreds of applicants felt like a major milestone, and a read vindication of the choice I’d just made. The course was truly a life changing experience for me and I will be forever grateful for the opportunity.”

Clare Conville said:

“Steve’s determination impressed me from the start. BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP is a powerful, complex psychological thriller, but it is also a marvellous and potentially prize-winning novel about the nature of love. The interest in this book internationally has been unprecedented for us at Conville and Walsh with deals now concluded in seven countries, including the UK, Australia and the USA. We expect to sell in over thirty territories in due course. I also think BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP has the potential to be a brilliant film along the lines of Copycat or Memento and we have serious film interest. Steve is a wonderful writer with great emotional intelligence and we are enormously proud and excited that he is part of Conville and Walsh.”

BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP is the story of Christine, a forty-seven-year-old writer who, following a catastrophic accident in her mid-twenties, is incapable of forming and maintaining new memories for more than a day. Trapped in an existence in which she wakes every day believing herself to be single and with a whole lifetime of choice ahead of her she discovers instead that she lives with her husband, Ben, with most decisions already made. The novel charts her attempts to make sense of her world. When Chrissie learns that she has been meeting with a doctor who is helping her to recover her memory - and that following his suggestion she has been keeping a journal in order to record her fragmentary recollections and piece together her past - she is hopeful that she may be cured. But the story that emerges is to set in motion a terrifying voyage of discovery that will ultimately have startling consequences for her and all who love her, leading her to question whether the truth is sometimes better left forgotten.

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