Cologne Guy v Ladybook: battle of the beach reads

This, even more than Christmas, is the week when writers get their hopes up. The busiest week of the summer holiday season, in which even people who "don't have time to read" find they have to read because, on holiday, the only other thing to do is spend quality time with people you spend most of your life trying to avoid.

There's no cinema in the resort. The telly's in foreign. You go blind if you lie on the beach staring at the sun.

So they buy books. You can see them in WH Smith's, at the airport, peering nervously at the hundred upon hundred of Top Summer Reads, anxiously wondering whether they dare make a commitment to Jo Nesbo's The Leopard or whether they'd be better off with When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman or maybe Bella Pollen's The Summer of the Bear.

Some will give up and go for telly: The Fry Chronicles by Stephen... erm... the name's on the tip of my tongue, or, perhaps A Tiny Bit Marvellous by the magnificently voluptuous Dawn French.

Men have it easier. Bombs, blood, danger and derring-do, with improbably-chiselled homoerotic heroes - the sort of guys who appear in cologne advertisements - averting disaster, because that's apparently what we all think we could have been had the cards fallen slightly differently. Michael Connolly, John Grisham, Harlen Coben, Simon Scarrow, James Patterson: they're all are up there in The Bookseller's Top 50.

Yet the fault-line is unmissable. On the one hand you have the Cologne Guys - who, in real life, would never wear cologne in case their testicles fell off - being resourceful, following the trail, shrugging off trauma which would fell you or me, and eventually nailing the villains and living to shrug another day.

And on the other hand, you have the things (not necessarily with pink covers and curly-print titles) that unsuspecting men pick up on the beach, read a page or two, and then hurl away, going "Aaagh! LADYBOOK!"

But the ladybooks are where the market is. A recent bit of informal research at Gatwick, Heathrow, Corfu, Athens and Los Angeles airports convinced me that around three out of four 'holiday reads' are bought by women, and that, of those, about 70 per cent are, in one way or another, ladybooks. (Ten per cent are Cologne Guy books, presumably being bought for men who are simultaneously thrown into absolute confusion and terrified of growing breasts if they venture beyond the Business & Leadership section of a bookshop, of which more next week.)

We men know about ladybooks. They lack the clanking fatuity of chick-lit, but are concerned with love and manners and feelings and empathy. They betray a fascination with the minutiae of human sensibility and the inner life which Cologne Guy books steer away from. You don't understand it, kill it.

But you can't beat on-the-ground intel. So last week I applied the burnt cork, hurled a rough-netting serape studded with twigs and leaves over my head, and settled down with one of this year's hottest summer sellers, S J Watson's Before I Go To Sleep.

So. Woman wakes up thinking she's twentysomething, finds she's fortysomething, husband she doesn't recognise, dead child, all her past destroyed in a fire, her memory obliterated for 20 years, and what she learns each day is inexorably erased each night when she sleeps. Like a diabolical version of Groundhog Day. Feelings. Relationships. Personal identity. What it means to be a woman. What it means to be human. Ladybook.

But we Cologne Guys tough it out. And it turns out to be a remarkable, disturbing and all-too-possible journey into the unspeakable - and almost unimaginable - depths of profound amnesia. It's overlaid with a mystery plot (one has to keep the readers gripped) but is based on a simple truth: our memory is what gives us our identity.

The McGuffin of profound amnesia is based on one of Oliver Sacks's cases, a musicologist called Clive whose short-term memory reset roughly every 15 seconds. But all in all, this is a novel which will make the reader reassess what it means to be human: something even Cologne Guys need to do. Buy it, before you get on the plane.

Ladybook? As it turns out, no. And guess what? Only after I'd finished it, did I discover S J Watson is a man.

• Before I Go To Sleep by S J Watson, Doubleday. ISBN 978-0857520173 ·