Sleep Donation

By: Karen Russell

Narrated by: Allyson Ryan

Length: 4 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

A haunting novella from the uncannily imaginative author of the national best sellers Swamplandia! and Orange World: the story of a deadly insomnia epidemic and the lengths one woman will go to to fight it.

Trish Edgewater is the Slumber Corps' top recruiter. On the phone, at a specially organized Sleep Drive, even in a supermarket parking lot: Trish can get even the most reluctant healthy dreamer to donate sleep to an insomniac in crisis - one of hundreds of thousands of people who have totally lost the ability to sleep. Trish cries, she shakes, she shows potential donors a picture of her deceased sister, Dori: one of the first victims of the lethal insomnia plague that has swept the globe. 

Run by the wealthy and enigmatic Storch brothers, the Slumber Corps is at the forefront of the fight against this deadly new disease. But when Trish is confronted by "Baby A", the first universal sleep donor, and the mysterious "Donor Y", whose horrific, infectious nightmares are threatening to sweep through the precious sleep supply, her faith in the organization and in her own motives begins to falter. 

Featuring a brand-new "Nightmare Appendix", Sleep Donation will keep listeners up long into the night and long after haunt their dreams. 

This audiobook includes a bonus PDF of a Slumber Corps Alert booklet outlining Active Nightmare Outbreaks in the US. 

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio. 

©2020 Karen Russell (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"An audaciously allegorical novella.... As engaging as it is provocative." (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) 

"[Written] with Twilight Zone-like inventiveness and the energy and brio of a natural fantasist with a proclivity for blending the real and surreal, the psychological and the sci-fi....[Russell] creates a fully imagined world with its own rituals and rules, and deftly satirizes the media and governmental responses to the plague of sleeplessness....Another testament to her fertile powers of invention." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review) 

"A starkly dystopian novella reminiscent of George Saunders in its bleak humor, the directness of its prose." (Los Angeles Times) 

Timely

The power of listening to this insomnia pandemic story during Covid-19 is that it reiterates the levels of desperation and suffering that occurs when a basic but integral part of daily life is curtailed--in the story, it's sleep, in daily life, it's human touch, intimacy, and freedom of movement. I appreciate the razor edge the heroine walks between ethics, compassion, brutal capitalism, and her personal experience. The situation and what we are navigating today are far more complex than we admit, and every decision sounds multivalent consequences. Great, thoughtful storytelling.

The writing is fantastic but it didn’t resonate

I enjoyed it very much but when baby a’s dad and the protagonist wander around the sleep ghetto I got weary.

Haunting, eerie and beautiful

Haunting and beautiful story. A good social commentary about how our society has poised us to commercialize everything, including our pain, our guilt. Lots of folks say there is no plot. The plot is not the point here.

Disappointing and incoherent

A tremendous disappointment. It had no focus, no point, no story. It was a collection of interesting puzzles that failed to lock together. I kept waiting for the novel to cohere and it never did. Each of the storylines could have been developed but none of them were. What do we owe our dead? How do we persuade people to do what's in the best interests of many while accepting some personal jeopardy? How does a successful workplace persona change the person who enacts it? What are the social and political consequences of a pandemic of life-limiting insomnia? How hard is it for a non-profit to keep its mission intact? What happens to people when their work devours their lives? What if unspeakable nightmares were contagious? So many topics to juggle but so little connection between them. I kept waiting for the point at which the novel coalesced, but it never arrived.

This might be a decent first draft of something, but it is very far from being a completed work. It has some of the insightful and witty observations for which Russell is known but those are not enough to carry it.

Good narration, though.

struggled with this...skipped several chapters

I like odd books but skipped chapters to get to the ending on this one. didn't care much for it, story line too dry and narrator was too robotic. I got bored.