Sleep

‘A haunting and beautiful novel’ ANN PATCHETT

'Deeply satisfying … beautifully written’ POLLY SAMSON

'A magnetic, breathtaking novel’ CHERIE JONES

‘Beautiful … I adored it’ CHRIS WHITAKER

A most anticipated book of 2025 in The New York Times, Elle, People, Oprah Daily and SheerLuxe.

From a dazzling new talent, a 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.

How much of our lives are ours alone?

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 tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes but her family life requires careful prudence. Then one fateful summer, everything changes. A line is crossed and 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. She’s newly divorced and navigating life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new boyfriend. 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 the family she carries inside herself as she builds a family of her own.

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

‘Sleep has a real heart, beating with courage and rage. I loved it’ Abigail Dean, author of Girl A

'Sleep is thrillingly virtuosic – beguiling, unsettling and stylish’ Jessica Stanley, author of A Great Hope

‘Marks the arrival of an astonishing new voice’ J. Courtney Sullivan, author of The Cliffs

© 2025 Fourth Estate (Audiobook): 9780008722920

Release date

Audiobook: 22 May 2025