In the vein of S.J. Watson’s Before I Go To Sleep and Christopher Nolan’s Memento, an electrifying novel of memory and murder.
STAY AWAKE
by Megan Goldin
St. Martin’s Press, August 2022
(via The Gernert Company)
Liv Reese wakes up in the back of a taxi with no idea where she is or how she got there. When she’s dropped off at the door of her brownstone, a stranger answers—a stranger who now lives in her apartment and forces her out in the cold. She reaches for her phone to call for help, only to discover it’s missing, and in its place is a bloodstained knife. That’s when she sees that her hands are covered in black pen, scribbled messages like graffiti on her skin: STAY AWAKE.
Two years ago, Liv was living with her best friend, dating a new man, and thriving as a successful writer for a trendy magazine. Now, she’s lost and disoriented in a New York City that looks nothing like what she remembers. Catching a glimpse of the local news, she’s horrified to see reports of a crime scene where the victim’s blood has been used to scrawl a message across a window, the same message that’s inked on her hands. What did she do last night? And why does she remember nothing from the past two years? Liv finds herself on the run for a crime she doesn’t remember committing as she tries to piece together the fragments of her life. But there’s someone who does know exactly what she did, and they’ll do anything to make her forget—permanently.
A complex thriller that unfolds at a breakneck speed, STAY AWAKE will keep you up all night.
Megan Goldin, author of The Escape Room and The Night Swim, worked as a correspondent for Reuters and other media outlets where she covered war, peace, international terrorism and financial meltdowns in the Middle East and Asia. She is now based in Melbourne, Australia where she raises three sons and is a foster mum to Labrador puppies learning to be guide dogs.
A young woman puts on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. So begins this powerful debut, which follows our unnamed narrator through cadaver dissection, surgical rotation, difficult births, sudden deaths, and a budding relationship with a seminarian. In the troubled world of the hospital, where the language of blood tests and organ systems so often hides the heart of the matter, she works her way from one bed to another, from a man dying of substance use and tuberculosis, to a child in pain crisis, to a young woman, fading from confusion to aphasia to death. The long hours and heartrending work begin to blur the lines between her new life as a physician and the lifelong traumas she has fled. 
Schleswig, 1872. Emma’s mother is furious when she turns down a proposal from an eligible bachelor. Rather than marry a man she doesn’t love, though, Emma boards the steamship Borussia and emigrates to California. In San Francisco, she accepts a position as companion to a wealthy widow, and soon falls in love with the likeable timber merchant Lars. They get married and plan to start a family, and Emma goes to live with him on Humbolt Bay. Yet their marriage remains childless, Lars is often away on business, and Emma is lonely. When Hans – owner of a shipyard, Lars’s closest friend and best man at their wedding – offers her a position in his office, the two of them develop deep feelings for each other. But there is a love that cannot be.
I’m all alone now, is Jule’s first thought when her mother dies. But when she goes to sort out her mother’s flat, Jule discovers documents that show she was adopted. Jule never felt properly close to her mother, and starts questioning her whole past: their sudden move to the West, losing contact with her father, her sister’s disappearance and her mother’s persistent silence… What would her life look like today, if she’d grown up with her biological family? Would she be happy? Jule knows that she has to find her birth mother to get answers. But she isn’t the only one who has been looking for them all these years…
‘Boy meets girl’: anything can start with this sentence – there isn’t a story that cannot be brought into the world with it. For Nora, too, a brief encounter changes her life entirely. All of a sudden she realises that she has for too long been a mere visitor in her own life. Now the painful end of her marriage and her ageing father’s increasing helplessness finally inspire her to make changes.