Sleep: A Novel

· Sold by Penguin
Ebook
224
Pages
Eligible
This book will become available on May 13, 2025. You will not be charged until it is released.

About this ebook

NAMED ONE OF OPRAH DAILY'S "MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025"
ONE OF PEOPLE'S "MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025"

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.

“Incredibly moving." – Ann Patchett
“Propulsive and funny and heartbreaking.” —J. Courtney Sullivan
“Heartbreaking, sexy, and full of humor . . . exhilarating.” —Xochitl Gonzalez


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.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.