Fans of experimental literary thrillers will devour S.J. Watson’s chilling debut Before I Go to Sleep (HarperCollins, $25.99). Narrator Christine suffers from a debilitating form of amnesia: she can retain new memories during the day, but everything vanishes while she sleeps. Totally dependent on her husband to fill in the gaps, she must relearn her identity each time she wakes. Recovery seems hopeless—until an energetic young doctor urges Christine to keep a secret daily journal and phones her every morning to remind her where she’s hidden it. Watson, an audiologist, penned the novel (told through Christine’s journal entries) between all-night shifts at a London hospital, and the result is a heady combination of cutting-edge memory theory and breathless, old-fashioned suspense.
In 1940, Greece is on edge as countries around it fall to the Axis powers. Special Officer Costa Zannis, stationed in the port city of Salonika, becomes tangled in the affairs of diplomats, spies, soldiers, and dissidents as he realizes what will happen if the Nazis achieve their plans. In Spies Of The Balkans (Random House, $15) Alan Furst creates moving characters caught in a moment where inaction is surrender and moral decisions have deadly outcomes.
The Singer’s Gun (Unbridled Books, $14.95) opens with two questions: how well do we really know our colleagues? And more specifically, why is Anton Waker alone on his honeymoon? Through meticulously layered flashbacks that reveal passport fraud, Kafka-esque bureaucracies, and an international crime ring, the talented Emily St. John Mandel does, eventually, give us answers. Moving from the grimy streets of Brooklyn to shiny Manhattan office towers to an idyllic Italian island, The Singer’s Gun happily subverts the conventions of both literary novel and genre thriller. Like Mandel’s wandering, amoral characters, this unique book resides in a netherworld of its own creation.
