NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORSโ CHOICE โข An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep in this mesmerizing novel from the bestselling author ofย The Age of Miracles.
โStunning.โโEmily St. John Mandel, author ofย Station Elevenย โข โA startling, beautiful portrait of a community in peril.โโEntertainment Weekly
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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Glamour โข Real Simple โข Good Housekeeping
One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleepโand doesnโt wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster.
Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreamsโbut of what?
Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human lifeโif only we are awakened to them.
Praise for The Dreamers
โWalkerโs roving fictive eye by turns probes charactersโ innermost feelings and zooms out to coolly parse topics like reality versus delusion. . . . [It has] the perfect ambiguous frame for a tense and layered plot.โโO: The Oprah Magazine
โ[Walkerโs] gripping, provocative novel should come with a warning: may cause insomnia.โโPeopleย (Book of the Week)
โPowerful and moving . . . written with symphonic sweep.โโThe New York Times Book Review
โ2019โs first must-read novel . . . Alternately terrifying and moving . . .ย The Dreamersย is overflowing with humanity.โโJezebel
โThis is an exquisite work of intimacy. Walkerโs sentences are smooth, emotionally arrestingโof a true, ethereal beauty. . . . This book achieves [a] dazzling, aching humanity.โโEntertainment Weekly