Sleep

By: Honor Jones

Published by Penguin Group, 2025-05-13

A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR AN OPRAH DAILY AND REAL SIMPLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize “Incredibly moving." – Ann Patchett “Propulsive and funny and heartbreaking.” —J. Courtney Sullivan "An exceptionally moving novel. Jones takes her cues from writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf."—The New York Times "Profoundly beautiful."— NPR From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised. Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made. Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away. Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents’ bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She’s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone. Warm and generous, unflinchingly human, and ultimately joyful and empowering, SLEEP is about the cycles of motherhood and childhood, the cost of secrets and the burden of love, and what’s on the other side of silence: the world, rich in possibility.