Christine wakes in a strange bed beside a man she does not recognise. In the bathroom she finds a photograph of him taped to the mirror, and beneath it the words ‘Your husband’.
Each day, Christine wakes knowing nothing of her life. Each night, her mind erases the day. But before she goes to sleep, she will recover fragments from her past, flashbacks to the accident that damaged her, and then—mercifully—she will forget.
Chilling, exquisitely crafted and compulsively readable, S. J. Watson’s debut novel Before I Go to Sleep is a psychological thriller of the highest order. It asks primary questions. Are there things best not remembered? Who are we if we do not know our own history? How do we love without memory?
S. J. Watson’s brilliant novel is now a major motion film directed by Rowan Joffe (Brighton Rock), starring Academy Award winners Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth.
‘A deft, perceptive exploration of a fascinating neurological condition, and a cracking good thriller.’
‘As far as psychological thrillers go, you can’t get much more psychological, or more thrilling.’
‘Quite simply the best debut I’ve ever read.’
‘An exceptional thriller. It left my nerves jangling for hours after I finished the last page.’
‘A deeply unsettling debut that asks the most terrifying question - what do you have left when you lose yourself?‘
‘Has an impossible-to-put-down quality…Before I Go to Sleep is a psychological thriller of intricacy and mind-bending qualities.’
‘It’s hard to think of a recent debut novel as original and ambitious in its premise - or as successful in its execution - as S. J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep. I also can’t think of any book I’ve read this year which so instantly hooks you with its opening…a complex, well-thought-out, literary psychological thriller.’
‘A top-class psychological thriller.’