DESCRIPTION

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Honor Jones is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and previously at The New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn with her three children.

REVIEWS

"Hypnotic... Jones crafts a nuanced and powerful exploration of a woman’s struggle to come to terms with her past… a masterpiece of carefully crafted perspective and tone…Margaret’s plight may feel tragic, but it’s transformed by sheer force of will — and Jones’s tempered prose — into something heroic, even hopeful."—The Washington Post

“Jones’s prose is spare but effervescent, her evocation of childhood is pitch-perfect, and she handles delicate subject matters in adroit and surprising ways.” —Elle

"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, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake

“SLEEP marks the arrival of an astonishing new voice in the world of literary fiction. Honor Jones writes with honesty and courage about life’s complications and contradictions. This novel is propulsive and funny and heartbreaking.” —J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of The Cliffs

“Heartbreaking, sexy, and full of humor . . . With elegant language and profound insight, Honor Jones transforms a story of family secrets into something utterly fresh, original, and exhilarating.” —Xochitl Gonzalez, New York Times bestselling author of Anita De Monte Laughs Last