A great long weekend read...

Looking for an end of summer book that will grab you and won't let go? Pick up a copy of S.J. Watson's book "Before I Go To Sleep." It's the writer's first novel and what a debut it is! The premise grabbed me from the start and kept me hooked right until the end. Thanks Tamye for recommending it!

 It’s a novel about a woman who, having lost her memory in a traumatic accident 20 years earlier, wakes every morning to a husband and life and body she does not remember and has to rediscover daily.
Christine, who turns out to be 47, wakes as the novel opens in an unfamiliar bedroom next to a man she for a moment thinks is an aging one-night stand. Instead the man is Ben, who says he’s her husband, that he’s always loved her, that she was in a serious car accident 20 years earlier and suffers from a rare form of amnesia: Although she can retain memories throughout the day, they are wiped out entirely overnight. Since memory is the largest part of identity, Christine truly does not know who she is. Losing one’s memory, it seems, differs little from losing one’s mind.

As Christine begins a desperate effort to reconstruct her life, she finds that she has been consulting a doctor, apparently without Ben’s knowledge. And she is keeping a journal, which constitutes the backbone of the novel. Dr. Nash must call her daily to remind her of her existence – and that of the journal. Every day she reads it afresh, which is the only way she can progress.
But soon cracks begin to appear in the constructed narrative. Ben seems to be keeping information from her. Was she a writer before the accident? Did she have a child? Can she trust Ben? Does she love him?
Aided by her daily secretive scribblings and re- readings of the journal, Christine begins to experience snatches of the past, but they remain inchoate, elusive. Until … well, I will say no more; find out for yourselves and enjoy the last long weekend of the summer!

Grab your beach bag!

     It's summer ... time to lose yourself in a good book.  The following is a list of some of my favourite "beach reads." True escapism at its best. You are sure to find something that appeals to you here, so grab your sunscreen and find yourself a comfortable Muskoka chair. Happy summer and happy reading! 

For Dr. David Beck, the loss was shattering. And every day for the past eight years, he has relived the horror of what happened. The gleaming lake. The pale moonlight. The piercing screams. The night his wife was taken. The last night he saw her alive.

Everyone tells him it’s time to move on, to forget the past once and for all. But for David Beck, there can be no closure. A message has appeared on his computer, a phrase only he and his dead wife know. Suddenly Beck is taunted with the impossible–that somewhere, somehow, Elizabeth is alive.

Beck has been warned to tell no one. And he doesn’t. Instead, he runs from the people he trusts the most, plunging headlong into a search for the shadowy figure whose messages hold out a desperate hope. But already Beck is being hunted down. He’s headed straight into the heart of a dark and deadly secret–and someone intends to stop him before he gets there.

Jane Whittaker has awakened to a nightmare. She doesn't know her name, her age . . .or even what she looks like. Frightened and confused, she wanders the streets of Boston wearing a blood-soaked dress-and carrying $10,000 in her pocket. Her life has become a vacuum--her past vanished. . .or stolen. And all that remains is a handsome, unsettling stranger who claims to be her husband, whispered rumors about a dead child whom she cannot recall. . .and a terrifying premonition that something truly horrible is about to occur.

Books for your beach bag...

    It's summer ... time to lose yourself in a good book.  The following is a list of some of my favourite "beach reads." True escapism at its best. You are sure to find something that appeals to you here, so grab your sunscreen and find yourself a comfortable Muskoka chair. Happy summer and happy reading! 

 
     Meredith Martin Delinn just lost everything: her friends, her homes, her social standing - because her husband Freddy cheated rich investors out of billions of dollars.
 
     Desperate and facing homelessness, Meredith receives a call from her old best friend, Constance Flute. Connie's had recent worries of her own, and the two depart for a summer on Nantucket in an attempt to heal. But the island can't offer complete escape, and they're plagued by new and old troubles alike. When Connie's brother Toby - Meredith's high school boyfriend - arrives, Meredith must reconcile the differences between the life she is leading and the life she could have had.
 
     Set against the backdrop of a Nantucket summer, Elin Hilderbrand delivers a suspenseful story of the power of friendship, the pull of love, and the beauty of forgiveness.

     Alice Love is twenty-nine years old, madly in love with her husband, and pregnant with their first child. So imagine her surprise when, after a fall, she comes to on the floor of a gym (a gym! she HATES the gym!) and discovers that she's actually thirty-nine, has three children, and is in the midst of an acrimonious divorce.

     A knock on the head has misplaced ten years of her life, and Alice isn't sure she likes who she's become. It turns out, though, that forgetting might be the most memorable thing that has ever happened to Alice.

     When NYPD cop Lauren Stillwell spots her husband leaving a hotel with a sexy woman, she doesn't call Dr. Phil; she goes ballistic. Her devious plan to exact retribution, however, lands her in a messy situation that no marriage manual could solve. To make bad things worse, her latest department assignment forces her to confront her core values and a deadly secret. James Patterson's The Quickie is a brisk read that will leave you breathless.

     On the day she was abducted, Annie O’Sullivan, a 32-year-old realtor, had three goals—sell a house, forget about a recent argument with her mother, and be on time for dinner with her ever-patient boyfriend. The open house is slow, but when her last visitor pulls up in a van as she's about to leave, Annie thinks it just might be her lucky day after all.