'Beautiful ... incredibly moving' ANN PATCHETT

'Deeply satisfying ... beautifully written' POLLY SAMSON

'Exceptionally moving' NEW YORK TIMES

'Magnetic, breathtaking' CHERIE JONES

'Beautiful ... I adored it' CHRIS WHITAKER

'Profoundly beautiful' NPR

A must-read novel of the summer in Sunday Times Style and Good Housekeeping.

A dazzling debut following a newly divorced young mother reckoning with a long-buried secret as she returns home one summer.

A family secret. A new love. The chance to start again.

Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family's lush backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes but her family life requires careful prudence. Then one fateful summer, everything changes. A line is crossed and 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. She's newly divorced and navigating life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new boyfriend. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush from all those summers ago, punched out of time. She must now reckon with the echoes between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child truly safe, and the family she carries inside herself as she builds a family of her own.

Beautiful, wry, humane and life-affirming, Sleep is about the burden of love and what lies on the other side of silence: the world, rich in possibility.

A most anticipated book of 2025 in New York Times, Elle, People, Oprah Daily and SheerLuxe.

'Jones takes her cues from writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf' NEW YORK TIMES

'A masterpiece of carefully crafted perspective and tone ... heroic, even hopeful' WASHINGTON POST

'A compelling debut about motherhood, buried trauma and how we learn to set ourselves free ... Shattering, but also witty, arch, probing and hopeful' SUNDAY TIMES STYLE

'A melancholic, moving read that explores how we carry trauma within us, written in beautiful, sun-saturated prose' GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

'Jones's prose is spare but effervescent' ELLE

'Sleep has a real heart, beating with courage and rage. I loved it' ABIGAIL DEAN, author of The Death of Us

'Thrillingly virtuosic - beguiling, unsettling and stylish' JESSICA STANLEY, author of Consider Yourself Kissed

The stunning and moving new debut novel of 2025 - 'Beautiful' Ann Patchett

About the Author

Honor Jones is a senior editor at The Atlantic and formerly worked as a senior staff editor at The New York Times' Opinion desk; her writing has appeared in The Atlantic and The New York Times.

Reviews

'An exceptionally moving novel' New York Times Book Review

'Profoundly beautiful' NPR

'A compelling debut about motherhood, buried trauma and how we learn to set ourselves free ... Shattering, but also witty, arch, probing and hopeful' Pandora Sykes in Sunday Times Style

'A melancholic, moving read that explores how we carry trauma within us, written in beautiful, sun-saturated prose' Good Housekeeping '50 Best Ever Beach Reads'

'An unsettling narrative of family secrets and buried wounds ... Jones's prose is spare but effervescent, her evocation of childhood is pitch-perfect' Elle, 'The Best Books of Spring 2025'

'A masterpiece of carefully crafted perspective and tone ... hypnotic' Washington Post

'A haunting and beautiful novel about a desperate attempt to live in the present despite the tidal pull of the past ... incredibly moving' Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake

'Beautiful, bruising, incisive and heartfelt. Sleep takes a moving, maddening, funny and searing look at childhood, family and marriage. I adored it' Chris Whitaker, author of All the Colours of the Dark

'Beautifully written and atmospheric, with both wit and piercing observations ... I will recommend Sleep far and wide' Polly Samson, author of A Theatre for Dreamers

'Sleep marks the arrival of an astonishing new voice in the world of literary fiction ... This novel is propulsive and funny and heartbreaking' J. Courtney Sullivan, author of The Cliffs

'A novel of quiet, devastating beauty ... I loved it' Abigail Dean, author of Girl A

'Sleep is thrillingly virtuosic - beguiling, unsettling and stylish' Jessica Stanley, author of Consider Yourself Kissed

'A magnetic, breathtaking novel. I could not put it down and will be recommending it to everyone I know' Cherie Jones, author of How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

'Heartbreaking, sexy, and full of humour ... Jones transforms a story of family secrets into something utterly fresh, original, and exhilarating' Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming

Book Information
ISBN 9780008722906
Author Honor Jones
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Fourth Estate Ltd
Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
Weight(grams) 270g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 135mm * 28mm