Stay Awake

Goldin’s (The Night Swim) startling work immerses readers in the disorientation and vulnerability that is amnesia. Every time Liv Reese wakes up, she has no memory of the previous two years. Notes that she writes on her hands and Post-its on her doors and walls guide her to contact friends who can help and to find the precious journal that details each vanished day. She repeatedly learns afresh that she was injured two years ago, leading to her memory problems, while other terrible events from that time are slowly revealed. In the present, the awakening that opens the book sees her running from an apartment with a bloody knife. Did she hurt someone? Whose apartment was that? Why does it seem like a different season? Then the point of view switches to a dead body being found, and a chase is on that sees us switching back and forth in time from before the injury, when Liv was a nightlife-loving young New Yorker who worked at a high-status magazine, to a few days before the bloody-knife incident, when the past catches up to her with a vengeance. The displacement caused to Liv by her condition is visited on readers to fast-paced and thought-provoking effect here; the story is gripping too, all adding up to a top-shelf psychological thriller for fans of Alice LaPlante.