Through the sublimely unreliable voice of its narrator, Karin, Before You Sleep reaches back from present-day Oslo to 1930s Brooklyn to relate the emotional legacies of the Blom family. Karin is both playful and melancholy-a serial seductress who defines herself in contrast to the women in her life: her mother, Anni, alluring, manipulative, and melodramatic; 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 soldier-grandmother June who bets that Karin will be the best damn soldier of them all. Inventive and wise, funny and disquieting, Before You Sleep marks the arrival of a gifted new literary voice.