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Published May 2020
192 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
This genre-defying debut memoir by Betty Trask Prize winner, 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" (Telegraph).
"Sleeplessness gets the Susan Sontag illness-as-metaphor treatment in this pensive, compact, lyrical inquiry into the author's nighttime demons. An exquisitely rendered voyage into the 'shapelessness of a life without sleep, where days merge unbounded.'" - Kirkus Reviews
"[M]asterful and captivating...At once intensely personal and universal." - Booklist
"Recommended for those curious about the creative process and the devastating effects of sleep deprivation." - Library Journal
"[B]eautifully, if unsettlingly, Harvey captures the roiling exhaustion, the fuggy disbelief and irrational anger of this newly uncertain state when 'the world becomes profoundly unsafe' and the boundaries between the inner and outer self start to blur…Readers looking for their own cure will instead find an erudite companion to help them through the dark times." - Sunday Times (UK)
"Poetic, visceral…The Shapeless Unease contains many beautiful and poignant passages about the human will to keep on living...Harvey's imagery casts a spell." - The Times (UK)
"It's funny, sad, wry, always worrying away at the mystery of sleep and its absence and finding endless new angles so that the whole has something of the quality of those waking dreams that haunt the insomniac and are her private country. There's also something unrefined, raw and spontaneous about the writing that I found hugely appealing." - Andrew Miller
"The Shapeless Unease captures the essence of fractious emotions – anxiety, fear, grief, rage – in prose so elegant, so luminous, it practically shines from the page. Harvey is a hugely talented writer, and this is a book to relish." - Sarah Waters
"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
This information about The Shapeless Unease was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Samantha Harvey is the author of The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief, and The Western Wind. Her work has been longlisted for the Bailey's Prize and the Man Booker, and finalist for the James Tait Black Award, the Orange Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness won the Betty Trask Award in 2009. She teaches Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
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