Dark Awakening — Adam Falconer

Christmas Eve 2012 and although Sophies return from a seven-day break in Germany is imminent, for Tyra an entire week without seeing her best friend proves the catalyst for a protracted, vivid and deeply-upsetting dream which ensures life will never quite be the same again.

Throughout the nocturnal hours which span a period of more than two years, Tyra encounters people and places of which she has no previous recollection but where does fiction end and fact begin? Where is the dividing line between implausibility and the brutal, shocking reality of the physical world?

Within twenty-four hours Tyra begins to see how such an event might not be attributed to some external trigger mechanism or an overactive imagination after all when the BBC screens a troubling documentary in its Timewatch series featuring names, faces and locations from that very dream.

One startling but indisputable detail to emerge from Sophie and Werners fact-finding holiday and which is, bizarrely, confirmed by Tyras illusory experience at virtually the same time, speaks of a Germanian child sold into slavery and ending her days in the Ephesus Gladiatorial School more than thirty years later.

Certain of a connection to her own distant past and desperate to uncover the facts surrounding the mystery-girls betrayal and removal from society, Tyra and her group embark upon an unpredictable and far-from-clear journey across Europe which, subsequently, not only reveals the cruel, wicked truth and yields results exceeding their wildest hopes, it also proves beyond all doubt that Tyras link to the slave girl is closer and more permanent than she dared imagine.