The Sleep Watcher
On sale
20th April 2023
Price: £9.99
‘Affecting . . . both tense and tender’
Sophie Mackintosh, Observer
‘Thoughtful . . . nuanced and powerful’
Spectator
One summer, sixteen-year-old Kit’s life is upended by a strange sleeplessness. While her body lies in bed, she is able to wander through the night undetected, roaming the streets of her run-down seaside town, entering the houses of friends and strangers.
But the most painful revelations are found closest to home. Unseen and unheard, she witnesses the dark tensions in her parents’ marriage and, as her family starts to implode, she is forced into an impossible decision that changes everything.
‘Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is one of the most distinctive and luminously original novelists of her generation’
Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti
‘Elegant, atmospheric, sharp-edged’
Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment
Sophie Mackintosh, Observer
‘Thoughtful . . . nuanced and powerful’
Spectator
One summer, sixteen-year-old Kit’s life is upended by a strange sleeplessness. While her body lies in bed, she is able to wander through the night undetected, roaming the streets of her run-down seaside town, entering the houses of friends and strangers.
But the most painful revelations are found closest to home. Unseen and unheard, she witnesses the dark tensions in her parents’ marriage and, as her family starts to implode, she is forced into an impossible decision that changes everything.
‘Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is one of the most distinctive and luminously original novelists of her generation’
Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti
‘Elegant, atmospheric, sharp-edged’
Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment
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Reviews
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.
In her uncanny central conceit Buchanan has hit on a perfect metaphor for the estrangement of adolescence. The Sleep Watcher is a beguiling, atmospheric work, at once wary and tender, of how we haunt our parents and how they in turn possess us.
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.
An incredibly moving story about connection, loneliness, and what we do when we think no one else is watching. Beautifully written - Buchanan's prose has a brilliantly sensitive touch.
Buchanan has written a beautiful book. In The Sleep Watcher she manages to a tell a story that is ethereal and other-worldly while being heart-breakingly human. We are lucky to have her unique voice.
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.
In elegant and restrained prose, the novel charts one young woman's summer of heat and dreams, of longing and rebellion, of relationships deteriorating and new experiences rising. No one is writing about the interior worlds of women like Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. The Sleep Watcher is an astonishing achievement, in which ordinary life and a magnificent unreality collide. I loved it.
The Sleep Watcher is a taut and vicious thrum of a novel, deceptively pretty and mesmerising as the calm before a storm. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan cuts close to the bone with her insights on family and secrecy, trust and power, and the dangerous, double-edged keenness of intimacy
I absolutely adored The Sleep Watcher. It is so finely wrought - with an aching, delicate beauty and suspense
Slippery, luminous, ethereal . . . like finding sea glass at the beach. Hisayo Buchanan writes like a dream, only this time her subject is also dreams, liminal spaces, adolescence on the brink of adulthood, sleep that skirts the rim of waking, what is real about her father at the creeping dawn of a young woman's realisation. She is my favourite contemporary writer
A lyrical, bracing read, wearing the influences of Kazuo Ishiguro, Ruth Ozeki and Virginia Woolf light as a perfume
Beautifully written and compelling
The pleasure in Buchanan's writing lies in her insightful phrases and shrewd observations
Thoughtful . . . nuanced and powerful
Affecting . . . both tense and tender
A powerful meditation on the realisations that come with adolescence