Writing to Recover the Past 
 A young woman wakes up in bed to find a middle-aged man sleeping beside her. So that's what she did last night? She staggers to the bathroom and looks in the mirror. The face that looks back at her is middle-aged too. 
 We've all had mornings like that. But for Christine, the narrator of SJ Watson's psychological thriller, this disoriented waking is a daily occurrence. As a result of some trauma, she is unable to form memories that last more than a day. Every morning she awakes, she has to have it explained to her again that she is at home, being looked after by her husband Ben, a chemistry teacher in a local high school. There are photos of them both around the bathroom mirror, and everywhere there are signs of his devotion. 
 But now something is different. Christine has been contacted by a physician, Dr. Nash, who is interested in researching her case. He has given her a journal to write in every day. Each morning, he calls her, to remind her where she has hidden it, and urging her to write some more. Occasionally, they also meet in person. So now Christine has a way of connecting one day to the next, and to build a store of memories that can actually add up. But what they add up to is not a whole number; something is missing; some things that she knows, or thinks she knows, conflict with others she has been told. And she begins, very faintly, to be able to recapture memories of her own.... 
 Readers are fascinated by the idea of the Unreliable Narrator. Here we have three of them at least. Christine can only write what people tell her, or what she half remembers. Ben, it is clear, is not telling her everything--but is this to protect her, or because there are things to hide? Dr. Nash is young and attractive; he asks that Christine keep their meetings secret from Ben; has he got another agenda? And Christine herself, as she will discover, is a published novelist; are her "memories" true ones or confabulation, the writer's imagination at work? 
 I am the border between four stars and five with this. "You'll stay up late until you know" says one of the reviews quoted on the back cover, and it is right: I did. But at the same time, the ending was not a surprise to me. I felt the climactic scene less involving than it might have been, perhaps because Watson himself had set the bar so high with his descriptions of more ordinary moments. There were also matters of chronology that troubled me--the lapse of time just seemed too long for everyone's actions to be believable; this was partly cleared up at the end, but doubts remained. And above all, knowing how long it takes for even a professional writer to write, I could not believe the basic premise that Christine could write journal entries of twenty pages or more describing the events of the day before she went to sleep. So not quite four stars, but a very high three.