The Sleep Watcher: The luminous new novel from Costa-shortlisted author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Apr 2023 · Sceptre · Narrated by Natalie Pela
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7 hr 12 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
The strange and tender new novel from Costa-shortlisted author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan: a sixteen-year-old girl watches her parents' marriage implode and her family shatter from a surreal viewpoint.
'That summer, my mind separated from my body as completely as an egg cracked from its shell. The splitting began in those hazy days just after exams were done when everything should have been easy.'
When she is sixteen, Kit suffers a summer of sleeplessness that isn't quite what it seems; her body lies in bed while she wanders through her family home, the streets of her run-down seaside town and into the houses of friends and strangers. Unseen and unheard, she witnesses her parents and their deteriorating relationship in a painful new way. Her home thrums with quiet violence that she can no longer ignore. With this secret knowledge it becomes impossible not to react and a single word soon changes everything.
Intimate, tense and exquisitely observed, The Sleep Watcher is a moving portrait of family, danger and guilt, captured through the strange summer heat of adolescence.
'A startling talent' Guardian
'The Sleep Watcher is a bracing and compelling portrayal of adolescence and feeling uncanny at home. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is one of the most distinctive and luminously original novelists of her generation' Sharlene Teo
'Elegant, atmospheric, sharp-edged... The Sleep Watcher is a novel that obsessed me from the moment I opened the cover.' Cal Flyn
'The writing is incredibly beautiful and unbearably tense - I had to hold my breath as I read. It is exquisite.' Ruth Gilligan, author of The Butchers
'An incredibly moving story about connection, loneliness, and what we do when we think no one else is watching. Beautifully written - Buchanan's prose has a brilliantly sensitive touch.' Julianne Pachico
'A beguiling, atmospheric work, at once wary and tender, of how we haunt our parents and how they in turn possess us.' Peter Ho Davies
(P) 2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
'That summer, my mind separated from my body as completely as an egg cracked from its shell. The splitting began in those hazy days just after exams were done when everything should have been easy.'
When she is sixteen, Kit suffers a summer of sleeplessness that isn't quite what it seems; her body lies in bed while she wanders through her family home, the streets of her run-down seaside town and into the houses of friends and strangers. Unseen and unheard, she witnesses her parents and their deteriorating relationship in a painful new way. Her home thrums with quiet violence that she can no longer ignore. With this secret knowledge it becomes impossible not to react and a single word soon changes everything.
Intimate, tense and exquisitely observed, The Sleep Watcher is a moving portrait of family, danger and guilt, captured through the strange summer heat of adolescence.
'A startling talent' Guardian
'The Sleep Watcher is a bracing and compelling portrayal of adolescence and feeling uncanny at home. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is one of the most distinctive and luminously original novelists of her generation' Sharlene Teo
'Elegant, atmospheric, sharp-edged... The Sleep Watcher is a novel that obsessed me from the moment I opened the cover.' Cal Flyn
'The writing is incredibly beautiful and unbearably tense - I had to hold my breath as I read. It is exquisite.' Ruth Gilligan, author of The Butchers
'An incredibly moving story about connection, loneliness, and what we do when we think no one else is watching. Beautifully written - Buchanan's prose has a brilliantly sensitive touch.' Julianne Pachico
'A beguiling, atmospheric work, at once wary and tender, of how we haunt our parents and how they in turn possess us.' Peter Ho Davies
(P) 2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
About the author
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You, Starling Days and The Sleep Watcher. She has won the Authors' Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award and been shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Her work has been a New York Times Editors' Choice and an NPR Great Read. Rowan was the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Gladstone's Library and Kundiman. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review and The Atlantic among other places.
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