When she is sixteen, Kit suffers a summer of peculiar sleeplessness that isn't quite what it seems. Her body lies in bed while she wanders through her family home, the streets of her run-down seaside town and into the houses of friends and strangers.
Unseen and unheard, she witnesses her parents and their fracturing relationship. Her home thrums with quiet violence that she can no longer ignore. With this secret knowledge it becomes impossible not to react and a single choice soon changes everything.
Intimate, tense and exquisitely observed, The Sleep Watcher is a moving portrait of family, danger and guilt, captured through the strange summer heat of adolescence.
‘Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is one of the most distinctive and luminously original novelists of her generation’
Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti
‘Elegant, atmospheric, sharp-edged’
Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment
The Sleep Watcher by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You, Starling Days and The Sleep Watcher. Rowan is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has won The Authors’ Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award and has been shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an NPR Great Read.
Her short work has appeared in several places including Granta, Guernica, The Guardian, The Harvard Review, and NPR’s Selected Shorts. She is the editor of the Go Home! anthology and Dog-Hearted.
She has received residencies/fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Millay Colony, Hedgebrook, Gladstone’s Library, The Asian American Writers Workshop, and Kundiman.