Sleep

‘A haunting and beautiful novel about a desperate attempt to live in the present despite the tidal pull of the past’ ANN PATCHETT

From a dazzling new talent, an utterly gripping debut novel following a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood as she returns to the family home one summer.

Every parent exists within two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made.

Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s lush backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools, Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful prudence. Her mother can be as brittle as she can be loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one fateful summer, everything changes. A line is crossed and in the wake of that betrayal the simple pleasures of girlhood slip away.

Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents’ bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She’s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush from all those summers ago, punched out of time. She must now reckon with the echoes between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child truly safe, and just how much of our lives are ours alone.

Beautifully written, unflinchingly human, and life-affirming, Sleep is about the cycles of motherhood and childhood, the burden of love and what lies on the other side of silence: the world, rich in possibility.