Thank you netgalley for allowing me to read and review this book. This was my first time reading anything from this author and I am now hooked! Amazing storyline. I felt so bad for the main character , Liv , as she tries to figure what is going on in her life. She runs all over trying to stay awake because if she falls asleep she forgets everything . When murders of people she finds out were close to her begin to happen she isn't sure if she's to blame or if someone is after her. I loved the ending and it's not predictable at all. This book will easily be a top book this year !

5 stars. What a friggen ride!! This book was one of my most anticipated books of the year along side another book that failed to give me that feeling I was looking for so I wasn't totally convinced going into this that I was going to be satisfied. Boy was I wrong. Every time I thought I knew what was going on I was blindsided which is exactly what I look for in a book like this. Highly recommend and will continue to pick up this authors works in the future.

Wow!!!!!! This book kept me up reading for hours when I should have been sleeping! I have read a ton of thrillers lately but this one is unique and catches you from the first page . This story is great and will keep you interested until the very end. This author never disappoints! This is the kind of book where the ending could have sucked (it didn't) but you still would like the book because it was such an interesting journey to get there. Loved it!
Thank you to the publisher and @NetGalley for allowing me an ARC of this book.

4.75 – 5 STARS

WOW! What the heck did I just read?!

“Stay Awake” is one of those truly exceptional thrillers that drew me in from the very first page and held me captive right up until the very last!! It’s the story of Liv Reese, a young woman stuck in a rare fugue state, trying to piece together the missing fragments of her life before she falls asleep and wakes to find her new memories lost to her once again. At the same time, Liv appears to be the lead suspect in a murder investigation, and time is ticking as homicide detectives try to track down Liv, while Liv herself, is on a desperate search to uncover the truth. Despite a few lingering questions that remain unanswered, “Stay Awake” is one helluva twisty, unpredictable roller-coaster ride for sure!!

This book really had me going! It's about a woman who loses her memory 10+years ago but builds a new life and eventually moves out on her own in a town where she isn't known as the lady who lost her memory, she leaves behind her best friend who also happens to be a lawyer. Of course things do not go as planned and the memory loss lady goes missing and it's up to her best friend and the police detective to make links between the past and the present and figure out what happened! The characters were great in this book and the book itself was a fast-paced and very easy to read I would definitely recommend to anyone who likes a mystery or thriller! Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for a honest review.

This book actually kept me up at night….to finish it. I needed to know what happened!!!

Liv Reese wakes up in the back of a taxi with no idea where she is or how she got there. When she’s dropped off at the door of her brownstone, a stranger answers—a stranger who now lives in her apartment and forces her out in the cold. She reaches for her phone to call for help, only to discover it’s missing, and in its place is a bloodstained knife. That’s when she sees that her hands are covered in black pen, scribbled messages like graffiti on her skin: STAY AWAKE.

Catching a glimpse of the local news, she’s horrified to see reports of a crime scene where the victim’s blood has been used to scrawl a message across a window, the same message that’s inked on her hands. What did she do last night? And why does she remember nothing from the past two years? Liv finds herself on the run for a crime she doesn’t remember committing as she tries to piece together the fragments of her life. But there’s someone who does know exactly what she did, and they’ll do anything to make her forget—permanently.

This book is incredibly well written. It is told from several characters POV. The twists and turns are fantastic. I highly highly recommend reading this book!!

I almost didn’t finish this book. I HATE when psychological thrillers have chapters in the POV of a detective or cop. In my opinion, that makes them crime thrillers, period. And I don’t read crime thrillers. But the premise kept me reading. I was hooked on the idea behind the plot and the easy writing style of the author. I tried to read The Escape Room by her previously and I couldn’t make it through, so that’s saying something. Anyway, I flew through it in just three days. I saw the twist coming, but there were enough suspects to keep me second guessing myself. I’m surprising myself by giving this one five stars because at the end of the day it was well written and thrilling, even if mislabeled.

Liv Reese wakes up in the back of a NYC taxi and has no idea where she is or how she got there. The story is very well done with lots of twists and turns. This book is fast paced and is a compelling read from a very good writer. Recommended!

4 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Liv Reese wakes up in the back of a taxi with no idea where she is or why. A stranger is living in her apartment and a bloodstained knife is in her coat pocket instead of a phone. All over her hands and arms she finds notes to herself, including one that stands out among the rest: STAY AWAKE. Soon, Liv sees reports of a murder with the same message written on the window in blood. What did Liv do, and why can’t she remember anything?

I found this book super interesting and I was into it from start to finish! Every time Liv falls asleep, her memory resets and she can’t remember anything from the last two years. Throughout the book we learn more about her disorder as she tries to piece her life together (present POV), and more about the trauma that caused it (past POV). There are also chapters from the detective’s perspective as more and more evidence from the murder scene points to Liv. (There are some confusing shifts in POV between the two detectives, but it’s a minor issue.)

Overall I enjoyed this story. The plot kept me reading late into the night, trying to figure out what happened to Liv!

Thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this ARC in exchange for an honest opinion.

Thanks NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for honest review.
Liv, the protagonist, wakes up disoriented and can't remember the last two years. Something bad happened that trigged this fugue. She is wanted by the police in a recent murder and someone is out there looking for her. A decent thriller filled with puzzles and memory loss.

Excellent

This caught me right from the start. Liv has a disorder, probably caused by overuse of caffeine and other stimulants that keep her from sleeping, where she "resets" every time she sleeps. She goes back to a time two years ago, right before she was almost killed in a brutal attack.

The plot was excellent. Liv was well-written, as was a detective that would make an excellent recurring lead character in future books. The ending faltered a little to me, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. It would make an excellent movie.

It s nothing like "Gone Girl", but if you enjoyed that, or even if you didn't, I highly recommend this book.

This was hugely disappointing. The plot was full of holes, characters are flat, and the dialogue was atrocious. I loved The Night Swim and so wanted to love this too.

3.5 rounded up for the latest from Megan Goldin!

This was a solid thriller; fast-paced, easy-to-read, and a uniquely-exciting plot in the vein of the movie "Memento." Liv Reese must stay awake in order to piece together the details of her own life, because every time she falls asleep, her memory of the last two years is mysteriously gone the moment she wakes up. Liv's life--both past and present--is riddled with unreliable characters, and without her own memory to rely on, it's impossible for Liv to know who to trust.

Parts of this thriller really worked for me. I loved the chapters written from Liv's perspective and how the missing pieces of her story gradually came together. The plot felt fresh and kept me turning the pages late at night past when I should have been reading. The chapters centering on the police investigation side of the plot felt a bit dull and lacked the depth that Liv's chapters had; ultimately, I never got to the point where I cared about either of the detectives or the procedural side to the mystery.

Overall a well-written, exhilarating thriller, I have a feeling this will be a crowd-pleaser for anyone who loved "Girl on the Train" and "Woman in the Window."

*Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the gifted advanced reader's copy of this title in exchange for an honest review*

I couldn’t put it down another amazing novel from an incredible author. This is expertly plotted thriller. Definitely one of the best thrillers novels I’ve read in a while. I love how it starts a woman with amnesia and then finds herself in murder investigation. I finished in one day a brilliant 5 star.

Intensely readable, Stay Awake gives thriller fans a puzzle to solve along with Liv, a protagonist who suffers from insomnia and memory loss caused by sleep.

SPOILER ALERT

There is so much potential to this story. I know it's an ARC and expect there to be errors, but it felt more like it was still in draft form, with some major plot holes, confusing POV shifts, and conflicts that put it in need of some additional editing. For this reason, I'm not posting on Goodreads in hope that my feedback will reach the publisher and author in time to make some adjustments before final publication. I didn't want to give it a star rating but unfortunately Netgalley won't let me share this review without it.

First, the main character in this book is suffering from both retrograde (inability to recall past memories) and anterograde (inability to store new memories) amnesia. From what I can gather, the retrograde memory loss is psychogenic, caused by the trauma of witnessing her best friend's murder. This is reported in the literature and is understandable. However, those memories are not gone--the access to them has simply been blocked, and can be recovered at least in part through trauma-focused therapy. I'm not sure why Liv never tried to do this, or why the court never mandated it given she was a murder suspect. Whatever, we'll accept that she can't access the memory of what happened after she got the call from her best friend (which is drummed into the reader over and over ad nauseam). Liv then goes on with her life, and for nearly two years has no additional memory problems other than not remembering those few hours. Suddenly, five weeks ago, she develops anterograde amnesia: every time she goes to sleep, she forgets what happened that day. This is of course reminiscent of 50 First Dates. An extremely rare condition, it has really only been reported in association with head trauma.

Here is the problem: the assumption within the story is that Liv's anterograde amnesia is caused by "severe insomnia" related to taking megadoses of stimulants. But then the reason she's taking those stimulants is purportedly because she's afraid of losing her memories if she goes to sleep. This is a total conundrum. I kept waiting for some other explanation as to why she started trying to stay awake, or to why she suddenly developed anterograde amnesia (especially something caused by the killer). Unfortunately, that never happened, and to make matters worse, as soon as the killer is caught, Liv's anterograde memory suddenly resolves, as if one good night's sleep made everything all better.

Here's another problem. Even if she developed anterograde amnesia, there is no good reason why she suddenly developed total amnesia of the last two years. While insomnia can cause memory problems, even severe insomnia wouldn't cause both this rare type of anterograde amnesia AND specific total retrograde amnesia up to the time that the psychogenic amnesia set in. This simply isn't how memory works. It would be so much better if there was another explanation, such as Liv suffered a head injury five weeks ago. Similarly, memory consolidation occurs during REM sleep, which means going through a full sleep cycle. Liv loses everything after nodding off for a few minutes. Again, this is something you see in a soap opera, not real life.

I liked the alternating POV between Liv's 1st person and Halliday's 3rd person, but I don't understand why Lavelle's POV is included in a few chapters. It's not frequent enough to be valuable (Lavelle never has another chapter entirely from his POV), and most of his perspective is telling rather than showing. The head-hopping really confused and threw me in a book that was already complicated.

There's also too much repetition. Yes, Liv is reliving the same day, but by the 50th time of "The last thing I remember was a phone call in my office on a summer day" I nearly stopped reading. It felt heavy-handed and made it difficult to suspend disbelief.

Many of Liv's actions make little sense, also. She constantly runs off minutes after going to find someone. While in one case there is good reason, likely due to underlying emotional triggers that weren't blocked by amnesia, but that aspect needs to be played up more to explain her actions so it doesn't seem to random.

Again, this book has great potential, even if it feels like a variation on the movie Memento, and I hope that you have time to make some adjustments before it goes to press so readers can get the best version of it.

This novel zipped right along, keeping the pacing nice and fast as we alternate between Liv in her current state, Liv two years ago, and the police investigating the murder that Liv might be responsible for. There's an interesting cat and mouse element running through much of the plot. And despite Liv being vague about her situation and maybe even her capacity for murder, you get to see how other people react to her and through their interactions you get a sense of the person Liv is and why you want to root for her.

Last year I read Megan Goldin's The Night Swim, which was a great concept with strong characters. Her new book Stay Awake is a decent thriller, but not quite of the same caliber in terms of plotting and pacing. I wanted to like this more than I actually did for a number of reasons, but I do applaud her for putting a fresh spin on the "amnesiac who might have killed someone" trope. I had a hard time getting into this one initially and found some of the timeline confusing, especially all the repetition. I really started to wonder about halfway through if this was a book in search of an editor. But once the story picked up things fell into place and made sense, and it finished as a fast-paced thriller. Thanks to St Martin's Press and NetGalley for this ARC.

Imagine waking up every single morning and not remembering any events of your life for the past two years.

That's what keeps happening to Liv Reese, a successful culture writer for a NY magazine. When she wakes up in the back of a cab holding a bloody knife, she can't remember the events of the previous night --- or anything since picking up her office phone, two years earlier.

Told in alternate timelines between the past, the recent past, and the present, you'll be desperate to find up what the heck happened to Liv and who she is able to trust.

Fast paced and thrilling from the opening line! Big Megan Goldin fan and this does not disappoint.

WOW WOW WOW. I have been a huge fan of Megan Goldin since I picked up The Night Swim (one of my favorite reads of 2021), and Stay Awake did not let me down. I'll be singing this book's praises for months to come!

The book opens with Liv Reese waking up in the back of a taxi, with no memory of how she got there or where she's going. When she reaches her apartment, she finds another couple living there, who insist she's in the wrong place. Her hands and arms are full of penned notes like "Stay awake!" "Trust no one" and jumbled addresses and phone numbers. And the most unsettling part? When she reaches into the pocket for her phone, she instead pulls out a bloody knife. Every time Liv falls asleep she forgets her past, and every time she wakes up she's convinced she's living her life from two year's before, where she lived in apartment with her best friend, was dating a new guy, and thriving in her career. What happened? And, more importantly, will she stay awake long enough to figure it out?

I couldn't put this novel down. Jumping from past to present and alternating between POVs, the story was so compelling and thrilling. While the premise may seem far-fetched, Goldin did an excellent job making readers fall head-first into the story. It was creepy, it was well-paced, and each storyline was as interesting as the next. While I normally become frustrated with plots centered around women with amnesia, this one felt fresh and exciting. I think many people will love this one!

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for the e-ARC. This was such a great thriller to kick off the year!