This genre-defying debut memoir by award–winning author Samantha Harvey weaves a tapestry of confessional anguish, flash fiction, cathartic poetry, and feverish observations on politics and psychology in a transcendent search for reality and truth.
In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness, from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help.
The Shapeless Unease is Harvey’s darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs.
Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and the will to survive, from “this generation’s Virginia Woolf” (London Telegraph).
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"[A] raw and unsettling account of twelve months of inexplicable insomnia…Readers looking for their own cure will instead find an erudite companion to help them through the dark times.”
— Sunday Times (London)
“Both cools and warms, lofts and lulls, settling gradually on its inhabitant with an ethereal solidity.”
— New York Times Book Review“The novelist’s examination of her year-long struggle with insomnia is poetic and inventive. Her hushed reading adds to the atmosphere.”
— The Guardian (audio review)“An exquisitely rendered voyage into the ‘shapelessness of a life without sleep, where days merge unbounded.’"
— Kirkus ReviewsBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Samantha Harvey is the author of one work of nonfiction and five novels, including The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize. Her books have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize, as well as longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize. She teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University, Bath, England.