Enquiring and enlightening, Harvey’s memoir of a year of insomnia uses sleep deprivation as a means of unlocking fundamental human truths and interrogating notions of reality and memory.
Sleep. Sleep. Like money, you only think about it when you have too little. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. It becomes the prism through which you see the world and nothing can exist except in relation to it.
Samantha Harvey's insomnia arrived, seemingly, from nowhere; for a year she has spent her nights chasing sleep that rarely comes. She's tried everything to appease it. Nothing is helping.
What happens when one of the basic human needs goes unmet? For Samantha Harvey, extreme sleep deprivation resulted in a raw clarity about life itself. Original and profound, The Shapeless Unease is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and grief, and the will to survive.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781529112092
Number of pages: 192
Weight: 141 g
Dimensions: 197 x 129 x 12 mm
[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. - Christina Patterson, Mail on Sunday
A delight to read… suffused with the sense of a timeless fable… ineffably rewarding. - Colin Grant, 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. - Sophie McBain, 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. - Roger Alton, 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. - Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
A wonderful blend of autobiography, poetry, prose and insight, The Shapeless Unease is novelist Harvey’s stark memoir of insomnia-and so much more. One of our boldest, most fearless writers here turning the lens on... More
Samantha Harvey is the kind of writer who could turn her hand to pretty much anything. Her prose, be it fiction or non-fiction, tends to lean into an intimacy that really resonates with me and this book is no... More
Blending essay, memoir, and fiction, Harvey’s fragmented prose reflects that of her sleepless state: she meanders through memories, existential anxieties and present emotions with a succinct style that articulates her... More
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