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" marked the arrival of a gifted new literary voice.