The Dreamers

A Novel

By: Karen Thompson Walker

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep in this mesmerizing novel from the bestselling author of The Age of Miracles.

“Stunning.”—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven • “A startling, beautiful portrait of a community in peril.”—Entertainment Weekly

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Glamour • Real Simple • Good Housekeeping

One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster.

Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?

Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life—if only we are awakened to them.

Praise for The Dreamers

“Walker’s roving fictive eye by turns probes characters’ innermost feelings and zooms out to coolly parse topics like reality versus delusion. . . . [It has] the perfect ambiguous frame for a tense and layered plot.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“[Walker’s] gripping, provocative novel should come with a warning: may cause insomnia.”—People (Book of the Week)

“Powerful and moving . . . written with symphonic sweep.”—The New York Times Book Review

“2019’s first must-read novel . . . Alternately terrifying and moving . . . The Dreamers is overflowing with humanity.”—Jezebel

“This is an exquisite work of intimacy. Walker’s sentences are smooth, emotionally arresting—of a true, ethereal beauty. . . . This book achieves [a] dazzling, aching humanity.”—Entertainment Weekly

Critic reviews

“The Dreamers is harrowing, riveting, profoundly moving, and beautifully written. In a word, this book is stunning.”—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven

“Walker offers a novel bursting with ideas, probing the scary and tantalizing possibilities at the edges of our existence.”—USA Today

“In The Dreamers, Karen Thompson Walker’s second novel, dreams are . . . both more dangerous and more powerful than the Greeks could have ever imagined. . . . Walker uses evocative language to describe the almost bewitching nature of contagion.”—The Washington Post

“Walker writes beautifully about the things that define how a society either endures or collapses in crisis, a theme that may never have been more timely than it is now.”—Minneapolis StarTribune

“[An] imaginative, disturbing, and ultimately spellbinding narrative, which asks provocative questions about our concepts of time and connection, and the bounds of possibility for life on earth.”—Vogue

“You’ll be mesmerized by this well-constructed, vividly drawn exploration of the concept of dreams versus reality.”—Marie Claire

“With mellifluous prose, Walker traces victims’ experiences (awake and asleep), along with how their family members, friends, and doctors respond to the crisis.”—Real Simple

“The Dreamers is a beautifully written novel that is powerful, thoughtful, and entirely original.”—PopSugar

“Richly imaginative and quietly devastating . . . Walker jolts the narrative with surprising twists, ensuring it keeps its energy until the end. This is a skillful, complex, and thoroughly satisfying novel about a community in peril.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Frighteningly powerful, beautiful, and uncanny, The Dreamers is a love story and also a horror story—a symphonic achievement, alternating intimate moments with a panoramic capture of a crisis in progress.”—Karen Russell, author of Vampires in the Lemon Grove

So slow.

So slow and boring. There’s no climax and I thought it would never end. Almost depressing story.

Whole new concept after Covid 19

As I listened to this book, I assumed it was surely written within the past couple of years, perhaps during lockdowns and quarantines. To realize it was written in a pre Covid world is wild. The author had so many of the details of what would happen, what people would do and say, just so spot on. The story was beautifully told, the words almost a melody of telling a tale just a bit of too much of modern day fairy tale, as I’m sure it seemed when released in 2018. Beautiful tales of sadness, of hope, of fear, of survival, of confusion, of love. There were so many elements of the emotional interactions of the people that were so accurate, so human, in their flaws and their highlights. People are not shown as all good or all bad, all hero or all villain, all brave or all cowardly. They all existed in between the ends of such spectrums, as is true in real life. While you are left with questions at the end, I feel that it was wrapped up just right, the questions left unanswered for the reader as they are also left unanswered for the characters.

a good summer read with drama, suspense

Great narration of a tale of a deadly breakout in a small California college town. Vivid characters who have you praying for their survival.

Narrator is hit and miss with voices

The narrator does fantastic with the female voices. But the male voices sound far too stern during portions in which there is just casual discussion happening.

The story is good, but perhaps not great.

loved this book during 'stay at home' orders

Somehow this story was very comforting during our current pandemic. I wish it was 5 times longer!