Before I Go To Sleep

"This is a domestic thriller, by a man writing from a female point of view. I read it when it was still in manuscript form, after an editor asked me if I wanted to do a blurb for it. I get these requests all the time. I thought, “Ah, that sounds like just a clever trick.” But he had me convinced from the first paragraph. It just feels so much like a woman’s voice. It opens quietly, with a woman waking up in bed. She sees a strange man lying beside her and thinks: “Oh my God, what have I done now?” She walks into the bathroom, looks at herself in the mirror and is shocked when she sees herself 20 years older than she thinks she is. Immediately all these questions are popping up. Then she finds a note she’s written to herself. It says: “Don’t trust your husband.” It’s a great example of how you don’t need violence to have incredible suspense. The only real violence in the book is at the end. Everything else is a slow unveiling of what really happened. The woman has a form of amnesia in which her memory is erased every night. So every morning she must piece the puzzle together all over again. A lot of it is repetitive – waking up every day, experiencing the same dilemmas – so the writer risks being boring. Yet somehow he manages to make every day just as exciting. That is why I had to include it. It’s a domestic thriller with no violence – how often do you see that? I tried to choose five types here. We started with the Gothic thriller. Then there was the spy thriller, the science thriller and the domestic thriller. The Informationist is the female-driven thriller. I am sure there are others. I didn’t look at legal thrillers and military thrillers, which are also sub-genres. Now there are even supernatural thrillers. The variety of thriller stories that you can come up with is endless, and I am sure there will be some new blending ones coming out. What is really important to me is that there is a unique voice. For example, in Before I Go To Sleep that female voice was so compelling that I wanted to listen to her. I will follow a book for a character, so if the character has no spark I don’t really care what the plot is. For me, it is about the voice and the characters. That is true, but pace doesn’t have anything to do with violence or bloodshed. It has to do with a sense of something not being right. I like the feeling of being off-balance, and that is what Before I Go To Sleep has. There is a sense that something isn’t right. So you want to get to the bottom of why everything feels out of kilter."