A poignant, urgent memoir about insomnia; the non-fiction debut by one of our finest novelists
Samantha Harvey is the author of the novels Orbital, The Wilderness, All is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind and a work of non-fiction, The Shapeless Unease- A Year of Not Sleeping. Orbital was the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, and her other work has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award, the Women's Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness was awarded the Betty Trask Prize. She is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
[A] remarkable book… [The Shapeless Unease is] an extraordinary
journey, but it’s also mesmerising. Harvey writes with hypnotic
power and poetic precision about – well, about everything: grief,
pain, memory, family, the night sky, a lake at sunset, what it
means to dream and what it means to suffer and survive.
*Mail on Sunday*
A delight to read… suffused with the sense of a timeless fable…
ineffably rewarding.
*Observer*
Urgent and wild, but also dazzling in its precision. This is what
it must be like to try to keep hold of a brilliant mind that is
threatening to unspool… a dark, seductive book about fear and
madness and their allure… Reading The Shapeless Unease can feel not
unlike dipping into strange, unchartered waters: it is by turns
bracing and soothing, with a dark undertow and glimmers of light at
the surface, and one emerges from it with an altered perspective, a
sense of time having slowed down.
*New Statesman*
Samantha Harvey's dazzling, dizzying trip through the nightmare
world of the sleepless...[is a] wondrous little book... a treasure
trove of material… The Shapeless Unease is also one of the best
books you will find about swimming. And its wonders.
*Daily Mail*
Intricately intriguing… astonishing… [The Shapeless Unease is] a
particular joy. It moves between topics with ease, and yet at its
heart it is an emotional book… I haven’t read a book which is quite
as clear about being a writer.
*Scotland on Sunday*
An engrossing vision of how our lives are knit together - day to
day, night to night, and thought to thought.
*New Yorker*
The Shapeless Unease is a merciless and self-mocking memoir in
which Harvey shows us the insomniac’s universe of “edgeless
expanse”… Writing should take us to places we wouldn’t otherwise
go, and Harvey invites us to open our eyes in the darkness and feel
the tiger in the room.
*Daily Telegraph*
The Shapeless Unease contains many beautiful and poignant passages
about the human will to keep on living… [and] Harvey’s imagery
casts a spell.
*The Times*
What a spectacularly good book. It is so controlled and yet so
WILD. One of the best books I’ve read about writing. One of the
best books I’ve read about swimming. One of the best books I’ve
read about mourning. And easily one of the truest and best books
I’ve read about what it’s like to be alive now, in this
country.
*Max Porter*
How can a book about a sensual deprivation be so sensuous and so
full? Gritty with particulars, concrete and substantial even when
it is most philosophical and far-reaching. I loved reading it
before I fell asleep every night – it seemed to give my sleep
resonance and poetry. What a beautiful book.
*Tessa Hadley*
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