Sleep

‘Beautiful … incredibly moving’ ANN PATCHETT 'Deeply satisfying … beautifully written’ POLLY SAMSON 'A rich tale you can’t put down' EMMA BARNETT 'Exceptionally moving' NEW YORK TIMES 'My favourite read of 2025' LAURA JACKSON 'Magnetic, breathtaking’ CHERIE JONES ‘Beautiful … I adored it’ CHRIS WHITAKER A best book of 2025 in Stylist. A dazzling debut following a newly divorced young mother reckoning with a long-buried secret as she returns home one summer. A family secret. A new love. The chance to start again. 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, wry, humane and life-affirming, Sleep is about the burden of love and what lies on the other side of silence: the world, rich in possibility. A must-read novel of the summer in Sunday Times Style, Elle and Good Housekeeping. 'Jones takes her cues from writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf' NEW YORK TIMES ‘A masterpiece of carefully crafted perspective and tone … heroic, even hopeful' WASHINGTON POST ‘A compelling debut about motherhood, buried trauma and how we learn to set ourselves free … Shattering, but also witty, arch, probing and hopeful’ SUNDAY TIMES STYLE ‘A melancholic, moving read that explores how we carry trauma within us, written in beautiful, sun-saturated prose’ GOOD HOUSEKEEPING ‘Jones’s prose is spare but effervescent' ELLE 'Profoundly beautiful' NPR ‘Sleep has a real heart, beating with courage and rage. I loved it’ ABIGAIL DEAN, author of The Death of Us 'Thrillingly virtuosic – beguiling, unsettling and stylish’ JESSICA STANLEY, author of Consider Yourself Kissed

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