Stay Awake

At a Glance

Genre: Psychological thriller
Setting: Contemporary New York City
Perspective: Alternating close-third between an amnesiac fugitive and NYPD investigators

Opening Hook

You wake in a taxi with a stranger’s phone in your hand, ink scrawled across your skin, and two missing years erased from your mind. The city is familiar, your life is not, and every note on your body screams one command: STAY AWAKE. A murder floods the news, a window smeared with the words “WAKE UP!”, and you recognize the handwriting as your own. Sleep isn’t just dangerous—it resets your world to zero, turning each day into a race against oblivion.

Plot Overview

In the opening movement, Liv Reese comes to in the back of a New York cab with no idea how she got there—or that two years have vanished. As detailed in the first five chapters, her hands are covered with frantic messages to herself—chiefly “STAY AWAKE”—and a bloody knife is stashed in her pocket. She heads to her old apartment only to find strangers, while her best friend Amy Decker and boyfriend Marco Reggio are unreachable. The city blares with news of a fresh homicide marked by “WAKE UP!” scrawled in blood—words that mirror Liv’s own inked warnings.

Detectives Darcy Halliday and Jack Lavelle catch the case. The victim is Ted Cole, a British magazine executive. Evidence lines up ominously: Liv’s prints on a wine bottle at the scene, CCTV placing her at the building, the knife—apparently the murder weapon—ditched near her old place. Overnight, Liv becomes both witness and quarry. Each time she falls asleep, her memory resets to the day two years earlier when life still made sense, forcing her to relearn the rules of her survival from the messages on her own skin.

As Liv scrapes together clues before sleep wipes them away, a buried past surfaces. Two years ago, Amy and Marco were murdered, and Liv was stabbed and left for dead; the trauma fractured her ability to retain new memories. Ted—once her fiancé—had been trying to help her untangle the truth. The breadcrumb trail of notes, half-memories, and gut instinct coalesces into a terrifying picture: someone has been stalking Liv and manipulating the narrative to make her look unstable and violent.

The reckoning arrives when Liv’s fractured recollections sharpen into recognition. The killer is Brett Graham, Amy’s surgeon boyfriend, who murdered Amy and Marco in a jealous rage and stabbed Liv to erase a witness. With Ted digging too close to the truth, Brett kills him and frames Liv, banking on her daily amnesia to seal the lie. In the concluding chapters, Brett abducts Liv, intent on finishing the job. Detective Halliday, increasingly skeptical of the tidy case against Liv, tracks them to an abandoned warehouse, shoots Brett, and pulls Liv to safety.

In the aftermath, Brett is arrested for all three murders. Liv is cleared, but her condition remains. She steps into a future built from fragments—her own notes, the trust she fought to reclaim, and a self fashioned from resilience rather than memory.

Central Characters

For a full roster and deeper profiles, see the Character Overview.

Liv Reese: A magazine writer whose anterograde amnesia turns her into both unreliable narrator and relentless detective of her own life. Liv’s terror gives way to grit as she learns to leave herself breadcrumbs and trust the instincts that memory can’t erase. Her agency grows with every reset, transforming vulnerability into a strategy for survival.
Detective Darcy Halliday: A methodical, quietly fearless investigator who resists groupthink and listens to the silences in a case. Her military-honed discipline and empathy keep her open to contradictions, guiding her away from the convenient suspect and toward the uncomfortable truth.
Jack Lavelle: A seasoned cop and Halliday’s partner whose pragmatism balances her intuition. Their initial friction settles into a respectful collaboration, reflecting the novel’s tension between evidence and insight.
Brett Graham: A respected surgeon with a chilling capacity for control. He weaponizes appearances and Liv’s condition, crafting a narrative that casts him as savior and her as threat—until meticulous manipulation exposes itself as monstrous.
Ted Cole: The victim whose death ignites the investigation and refocuses the past. Caring yet flawed, Ted tries to help Liv reclaim her life; his compassion and persistence ultimately lead him into the killer’s crosshairs.

Major Themes

For more on the book’s ideas and motifs, visit the Theme Overview.

Memory and Identity: Liv’s amnesia asks whether identity is a stable core or a story we tell ourselves from accumulated experience. Stripped of continuity, she must construct a self from habits, notes, and intuition—revealing identity as both fragile and fiercely self-authored.
Trust and Betrayal: The novel turns trust into a survival calculation. With friends gone, evidence distorted, and her own mind unreliable, Liv navigates a maze where misplaced trust can kill and earned trust becomes transformative.
Vulnerability and Manipulation: Liv’s condition makes her the perfect target for gaslighting. Brett exploits her resets to rewrite reality, illustrating how predators control narratives by isolating victims from certainty and community.
The Past's Influence on the Present: The plot is a literal return to a formative trauma that won’t release its hold. Liv cannot move forward until she names the past correctly, showing how unresolved harm keeps rewriting the present.

Literary Significance

Stay Awake revitalizes the amnesia thriller by making memory loss an engine, not just a twist: each reset compresses time, heightens stakes, and immerses readers in the vertigo of starting over. Goldin uses the unreliable narrator to align us with Liv’s fear and ingenuity rather than to trick us, producing tension that is empathetic as well as propulsive. The epigraph—“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you”—captures the book’s core friction between suspicion and reality, a friction exploited by a villain who weaponizes perception. In its sleek pace and psychological acuity, the novel sits alongside Memento-era puzzles while speaking directly to contemporary anxieties about gaslighting, surveillance, and the stories that define who we are.

Full Book Summary