winner of the CWA John Creasey Dagger 2011
winner of Crime & Thriller award at Galaxy National Book Awards 2011
quite simply the best debut novel I have ever read
– Tess Gerritsen
The bedroom is strange. Unfamiliar. I don’t know where I am, how I came to be here. I don’t know how I’m going to get home.
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.
S J Watson has worked in the NHS for a number of years. He was one of the first pupils on the Faber Academy Creative Writing Course. BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP is his first novel, and he is currently working on a second.