I Know You follows Eilidh, a Scottish teenager whose life flips from exam day nerves to heartbreak to something far stranger. What begins as a coming-of-age story full of friendship, grief, and young love suddenly veers into a haunting experience in an Ethiopian refugee camp, where suffering, compassion, and disorientation collide. The book jumps between timelines and perspectives in a way that keeps you leaning forward, trying to stitch the pieces together just as the characters try to make sense of their own fractured realities. It feels intimate at times and then shockingly vast, almost like two novels braided into one.

The opening stretch, set in Scotland, felt light on the surface, but it carried an ache that hit me harder as the chapters moved on. The writing holds a kind of gentle honesty. It stays close to Eilidh’s emotions without dressing them up, and it lets her teenage certainty sit right beside her unravelling doubts. When the story shifts into the chaos and brutality of the camp, the tone changes sharply. I felt the ground move under me just as she does. Those sections knocked the breath out of me. They were raw, unsettling, and written with a restraint that made everything feel even more real. I kept pausing, not because I needed a break from the book, but because the moments asked for you to think about them for a moment.

There were points where the transitions left me a little lost. Even so, the emotional core held everything together for me. The scenes of care, fear, and tiny human connections had me thinking about them and the story for a while afterwards. And the way the book treats memory and trauma felt honest. Messy. Human. I appreciated that it didn’t try to explain everything. It trusted me to sit with uncertainty, and that trust made the story hit deeper.

This is the kind of novel I’d hand to readers who like character-driven stories that wander into unexpected territory, people who don’t mind when a book lifts them up just to pull the rug and make them feel something sharper. If you enjoy coming-of-age stories that refuse to stay tidy or narratives that mix tenderness with real darkness, you’ll enjoy reading this book.

Pages: 328 | ASIN : B0C545LJDG