Before You Sleep Book

Through the sublimely unreliable voice of its narrator, Karin, Before You Sleep ranges from present-day Oslo to 1930s Brooklyn to tell the story of the emotional legacies of the Blom family. Karin is at once playful and melancholy, candid and elusive - a serial seductress who defines herself in contrast to the women in her life: her mother, Anni, the golden-haired, green-eyed virtuoso of manipulation, impossible to resist, with a seemingly endless arsenal of melodrama at her disposal; her sister Julie, a wife and mother undone by suspicions of her husband's infidelity; her aunt Selma, "the world's angriest old woman"; and her grandmother June, a damn good soldier who's willing to bet a hundred kroner that Karin will be the best damn soldier of them all.