The Shapeless Unease - Hardcover

In this astonishingly powerful memoir about insomnia, acclaimed novelist Samantha Harvey explores everything that is keeping her – and the nation – awake at night

‘Insomnia has turned me into a haggler. I’m always looking for the next thing I can trade with it or the next thing I can get from it, or the next bit of leverage I can use to cut a deal. . .’

For months Samantha Harvey has been enduring many sleepless nights in a row, grieving for her late cousin, angry about Brexit, worrying about getting older, caught up in problems from her past, desperate to stop thinking. . . Finding herself unable to write fiction, she decided to write about her affliction instead. The result is perhaps her most urgent and inventive work to date.

The Shapeless Unease is a beautiful, shape-shifting book, moving seamlessly from quasi-surreal scenes in which Harvey describes the sensation of being awake for nights and days on end, to painful appointments with a GP who is running low on time, resources and sympathy, to thoughtful enquiries into the roots of her insomnia. It is a vivid, unsettling reflection of the things we all lose sleep over.