Don’t Wake Me by Martin Krüger is a thriller with a great atmosphere and a very active subconscious mind, set on a remote island in Norway.
Location: set on a remote island in Norway.
Don't Wake Me synopsis
She came to the island to escape what she did. But the island won’t let her forget.
It was a terrible, terrible accident. Jasmin Hansen knows she hit something. It must have been a deer—that’s what her husband keeps telling her. But Jasmin saw a man’s face, and the nightmares won’t stop.
Some time out at their holiday home on the remote island of Minsøy seems the ideal solution for Jasmin and her five-year-old son, Paul. But you can’t hide from your memories, and Jasmin is haunted at every turn. When mysterious messages begin to arrive at her isolated cottage, it becomes clear that she isn’t the only one who knows what happened that night. Somebody wants her to pay. And when Jasmin uncovers the island’s shocking long-held secret, she realises there isn’t a single person she and Paul can trust.
As the island closes in on her and the threats against her escalate, can Jasmin discover who knows the truth of what she did before it’s too late?
Book Review
Jasmin Hansen travels to Minsøy to finally understand what happened on the night of the accident. She is very anxious at the start of the book and somehow the author of Don’t Wake Me manages to transfer that feeling of anxiety to me as a reader. I can’t exactly pinpoint why – it might be the lack of resting points in the narrative – but it is a nice feat. You’re jumping from scene to scene, feeling disoriented as you don’t know ‘when’ a scene is taking place.
You are in a constant dream-like state, but for Jasmin it is her reality. Her subconscious knows something that her rational mind can’t piece together yet. She feels uncertain and is constantly questioning herself and her memory. The eerie feeling that she has when observing her surroundings is emanating from the pages. I’m impressed by the ability of Martin Krüger (author) and Jozef van der Voort (translator) to keep me in that state for quite some time.
Then I picked up on some very clear (too clear and too early) hints; I won’t tell you where so that you won’t be looking for them too much when reading this book. When I figured out how the story was going to end, some of the magic faded and the story gripped me less. From that point on, I was simply reading to finish the book.
Don’t Wake Me is a solid thriller with a great atmosphere that I did enjoy reading. As said before, the plot is not surprising, but the setting and delivery of (especially) the first part of the book are strong.
Translated from German by Jozef van der Voort.
Interested?
Preorder your copy of Don’t Wake Me from Amazon (available 17 December 2020).
Many thanks to Amazon Publishing UK and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
