Forget My Name by J S Monroe

How do you know who to trust…

…when you don’t even know who you are?

You are outside your front door.

There are strangers in your house.

Then you realise. You can’t remember your name.

She arrived at the train station after a difficult week at work. Her bag had been stolen, and with it, her identity. Her whole life was in there – passport, wallet, house key. When she tried to report the theft, she couldn’t remember her own name. All she knew was her own address.

Now she’s outside Tony and Laura’s front door. She says she lives in their home. They say they have never met her before.

One of them is lying.

 

Unputdownable.

 

What would you do if a young woman knocks on your front door saying that she has lost her memory?  A young woman arrives at Heathrow airport.

She’s lost her bag, her phone, passport everything, including her memory.    All she knows is that she has a train ticket to a village in Wiltshire and every now and again she will get a flashback of her best friend, Fleur.   When she arrives in the village, she feels drawn to a cottage.  A cottage that is now owned by Tony and Laura.  A cottage that the stranger is able to describe right down to the tiniest details.  She must have lived here at some point in her past.

Tony decides that she looks like a Jemma,  (with a J) and with no reason not to, this is the name that she stranger begins to answer to. . . . but there was another Jemma (with a J) in the village before and after murdering her best friend at university, she has since disappeared.   Some of the locals are convinced that these women are one and the same person . . .

 

This book takes place over just 4 days and they are a bloody busy 4 days starting off at Heathrow Airport, taking us to a village in Wiltshire and then ending up in Berlin.   A fantastic fast-paced book that is full of twists and turns that at times left me wondering what the hell was going on.  Who am I supposed to believe?  There were a few different plotlines, but they worked well and all came together in the end even though there were the odd little bits that were utterly unbelievable – which I can’t go into without giving the game away – but this didn’t distract from my enjoyment of the book.  I found myself rooting for Jemma all the way through.  Sympathising with how terrifying it must be to suddenly have no memory of anything other than a house.

 

This is the first book that I have read by this author and I will certainly be keeping an eye out for more.