Awake Awake

A Novel

By: Fiona Mozley

Mary has started remembering things that she knows aren't real—but the events feel exactly like her actual memories. Who is she, if she can't be sure she knows her own past?

A writer in her 30s struggling to make rent, Mary has moved back to her childhood town to bartend and save money, when she starts remembering absurd events, clear and visceral as if they’d really happened to her. But she knows they’re too wild to be possible. Flashing back to her school years, she searches the past for what could have caused this split in her reality. The lives of their close group of school friends have since diverged, as life choices and politics, partners and children, have taken them to different places and placed them into other stories. But Mary must reconnect with them to find solid ground again.

Set against the disorienting and rapidly changing political backdrop of the 2000s and 2010s, Booker Prize finalist Mozley’s disarming coming-of-age tale is addictively readable, and poignantly captures the shakiness of identity – both personal and national – and the anchoring force of friendship.

Critic reviews

“A warm, kindly and beautifully written novel about growing up in a family and in history, about inconvenient memory and haunted repression.”—Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall

“An incredible achievement—a story of friendship, memory, loss, and moral duty unlike any I’ve read before. It’s beautifully written, elegantly structured, and so tight with tension that I paced my office as I read the last fifty pages. It’s a masterfully crafted love story and adventure story and family mythology all rolled into one, and chock full of well-earned surprises; every character and storyline could be its own novel, and yet they come together so thunderously and convincingly that I believed even the hallucinations. It blew me away! You’ll read it in two sittings.”—Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee

"A fascinating novel about our tenuous sense of self, friendship, and more."—Forbes, Most Anticipated "Weird Girl Lit" for 2026

“Awake Awake is a unique, visionary novel about the toll of memory and the power and fragility of the human heart and mind. Fiona Mozley gives a masterclass in the novel form, showing just how much room for invention we still have. I couldn't put it down.”—Kim Sherwood, author of Testament