Before I Wake (Unabridged‪)‬

From the award-winning author of What I Have Written.

Jonathan Ford, childless at 43, moves restlessly through other people's lives. From Australia to Europe he pursues a series of ill-fated relationships with the vulnerable and the insecure. In turn he is pursued by his past, whose echoes he finds all around him: in Danielle, a young French poet condemned to perpetual childhood; in the ageing Violet, wickedly irreverent even as she struggles through her days alone in a council flat; in the flawed genius of the painter Malcolm Richardson; in many lives, ordinary and extraordinary, that he changes in the profoundest ways. It is through two sisters, themselves once hostage to the past that Ford finally awakens to the present.