The Sleep Watcher

By: Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Narrated by: Natalie Pela

Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

A strange and tender 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.

©2023 Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (P)2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Critic reviews

"The Sleep Watcher simmers with tension and a constant threat of violence - and yet it is so delicately and cleanly observed as to make reading a pleasure. A pitch-perfect evocation of coming of age in a seaside town - with all the freedom and risk that comes of growing up among flawed and fractured adults. Elegant, atmospheric, sharp-edged...it is a novel that obsessed me from the moment I opened the cover." (Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment)

"With agonising precision, The Sleep Watcher captures that estranging moment of young womanhood when you suddenly realise your body, your parents, your whole world is nothing like you thought. 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)

"Charged with the otherworldliness and shrewd social perception found in the works of Shirley Jackson and Octavia Butler, 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 and I'll read anything she writes." (Sharlene Teo)