The Sleepless

What if I told you that sleep was just a habit? What if the third of your life you spend asleep, you could be awake instead?

Grafton is a single dad who works in local radio, but he’s always dreamt of being a ’real’ journalist. When he gets a whiff of a story - a Scottish commune whose residents believe that sleep is a social construct - he decides to investigate... something tells him ’the Sleepless’ might finally provide answers about his wife, Liz, who abandoned him and their son Isaac for a similar cult in India.

Born out of COVID-19’s age of ’alternative truths’, this commune set in Ardnamurchan, Scotland, rejects societal routines of sleep with the aim of achieving a toxin cleanse, a nirvana of sorts...

However Grafton finds the truth of the commune is much more sinister and its governance thirsts for blood, using torturous methods to keep its followers weak...

As Grafton is drawn deeper into the extreme world of the Sleepless, Liz reappears, and Grafton has to race to save both himself and his son...

＂The Sleepless is a dazzlingly smart and compelling thriller, which will grip you from its unforgettable opening scene and will linger with you long after you have finished it. Liam Bell is a writer of rare and distinctive talent, and this is a novel not to be missed. These are characters and situations - vividly rendered, unsettlingly plausible even at their most terrifying - which will haunt you, a novel which will keep you up all night. ＂ -Ellery Lloyd, author of People Like Her and Reese’s Book Club pick The Club

A page-turning thriller with a folk horror atmosphere, The Sleepless will appeal to readers of Emma Cline’s The Girls and Fred D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise.