In this twisty, mind-bending thriller from the bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes, Emma Averell worries that her crippling insomnia is a sign that she’s slowly going insane—like the mother she’s worked so hard to leave in her past.
Emma Averell loves her life—her high-powered legal career, her two beautiful children, and her wonderful stay-at-home husband—but it wasn’t always so perfect. When she was just five years old, Emma and her older sister went into foster care because of a horrific incident with their mother. Her sister can remember a time when their mother was loving and “normal,” but Emma can only remember her as one thing—a monster. And that monster emerged right around their mother’s fortieth birthday, the same age Emma is approaching now.
Emma desperately wants to keep her successful life separate from her past, so she has always hidden her childhood trauma. But then she’s unable to sleep, and now losing time during the day, also one of the first symptoms her mother showed. Is the madness in her blood, just as her mother predicted? Could she end up hurting her family in her foggy, frenetic state? Or is she truly beginning to lose her mind?
Sarah Pinborough is a New York Times bestselling and Sunday Times Number one and Internationally bestselling author who is published in over 30 territories worldwide. Having published more than 25 novels across various genres, her recent books include Behind Her Eyes, now a smash hit Netflix limited series, Dead To Her, now in development with Amazon Studios, and 13 Minutes and The Death House in development with Compelling Pictures. Sarah lives in the historic town of Stony Stratford, the home of the Cock and Bull story, with her dog Ted.
My Review:
If you have already read (or watched) Sarah’s brilliant BEHIND HER EYES, then you will know you are in for a twisty story that is part psychological thriller and part WTAF.
INSOMNIA is a difficult book to review without giving away spoilers so bear with me whilst I try to think about what to say.
Emma is our main character. She’s a very successful divorce lawyer, seemingly happily married to Robert who is a stay-at-home dad and mother to a teenage daughter, Chloe and a cute 5 year old son, Will.
Her 40th birthday is fast approaching and whilst most people have mixed feelings about this day, Emma is dreading it, because her own mother had a breakdown on her 40th resulting in Emma and her sister Phoebe being put into care and hasn’t seen her mother since that fateful day. Feeling nervous, anxious and stressed about the impending “BIG DAY” Emma starts to suffer from Insomnia, a condition that her mother started with just prior to her breakdown.
With lack of sleep, Emma starts to experience blackouts, extreme paranoia and slowly starts to lose her grip on reality, so when her sister Phoebe contacts her out of the blue and tells her their mother is in hospital dying, Emma’s life spirals out of control.
This is a book that centres about the stress and pressures of a working mother who is trying to do it all and is slowly falling apart. Without any support from her husband, who appears to be having a mid-life crisis himself, Emma has to face up to her past in order to deal with the present.
As usual with any Pinborough book, you should expect the unexpected.
