Before I Go to Sleep

Christine Lucas wakes every morning in a bed she doesn't recognize, beside a man who says he is her husband — and every night, as she sleeps, her memory is wiped clean again. An injury years ago left her unable to form new long-term memories, so each day she must be told who she is, where she is, and what happened to the life she cannot remember.

Then a doctor contacts her secretly, and Christine begins keeping a journal — a record hidden from her husband, read and rewritten each day, slowly accumulating the fragments of a past that doesn't add up. As the entries pile up, a terrifying question sharpens: if she can't trust her own mind, who can she trust at all?

S. J. Watson's debut is a tautly constructed psychological thriller about memory, identity, and gaslighting, built on a narrator who has to solve the mystery of her own life one forgotten day at a time.