Remember Me? – Sophie Kinsella

I loved “Can you keep a secret” so I was looking forwards to this. It’s a great premise: woman wakes up after an accident to find that she's lost her memories of the last three years of her life, and – to add spice – during those three years she has become a completely different person. It takes her the rest of the book to figure who she has become and why.

I liked the book’s central character, and I enjoyed the variety of characters around her. I quite like what the book says too, about the place of career and work – this works at a better level than just mindless escapism. It was sad that the main character couldn’t make her relationship with her husband work – in a sense, both of them finding themselves married to a stranger; if one truly believes in marriage for life then it ought to be possible to overcome something like that. But that would have been a completely different story. The blurb on the back of the book asks, “what if you woke up and your life was perfect?” And the rest of the book asks, what does a perfect life look like really?

And of course it makes you think, if you could wind back your own life like the main character here, wake up one day with a younger version of yourself inhabiting your life – what would they make of it? And what if you could do the same in reverse, wind your life back and have it over again with the benefit of hindsight – what would you do differently?

I felt quite down for a lot of the time I was reading this book, which I don’t think reflects fairly either on the book or my life.