BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP by S.J. Watson

Christine is a woman in her forties who wakes up each morning in bed with a strange man wearing a wedding band.  In the bathroom she finds photos of the two of them together and wonders what is going on.  Her reflection is even more terrifying, because she can’t remember her adult life at all.  Christine has an unusual type of amnesia characterized by the fact that sleeping through the night erases all of her memories.  Fortunately, a scientist named Ed Nash has developed an interest in her case.  He calls her every morning after her husband Ben leaves for work and tells her where her journal is hidden.  Ben does not know about Nash or the journal, and one of the first things she reads in the journal is that she should not trust Ben.  Every day her opinion of Ben vacillates between that of a loving husband and that of someone who has his own agenda for keeping her in the dark.  Each day Christine rereads her journal from start to finish and adds that day’s discoveries, building up a reasonable substitute for a short-term memory bank.  She finds that Ben has lied to her about everything from the birth of their child to the cause of her memory loss.  She tries to convince herself that he is just trying to protect her from truths that she cannot handle, because she really has no one else to rely on.   Then she starts having flashes of memories that help her start to assemble some of the pieces of her former life.  This book is sort of a cross between the movies Memento and Groundhog Day, but I don’t mean to imply that Christine’s story is funny.  In fact, it’s quite tense, and with each successive journal entry, I kept my fingers crossed that she would be able to build on that day’s knowledge and make the appropriate decisions the next day.  However, nothing is a given in Christine’s world, and she’s completely cut off from everyone except Nash and Ben, who both seem a little shady.  She finally reconnects with her old friend Claire, and the storyline gathers speed, as the intensity ramps up.  I wasn’t at all surprised by the ending, but the ride was still a thrill.