Sleepless

‘Sleepless is intellectually fierce, but also funny. Wide-ranging and constantly surprising in its interweavings, it is built from beautiful sentences as much as big ideas. It is a book that stays with the reader long after it is read.’

Fiona Wright

‘Darrieussecq sees sleeplessness everywhere, and on the page it is a fruitful madness. She rereads both literary canon and popular culture through bleary eyes, finding the insomniac in illustrious company…[Her] stylish bricolage is thrilling in its breadth...There is refreshing candour in Darrieussecq’s self-inquiry, detailing how she, like so many who find themselves in hypnagogic limbo, seeks relief in risky cocktails of booze and barbiturates.’

Monthly

‘Darrieussecq is exceptionally well-read and her prose is roving and referential. The effect is decadent and dexterous...The reading experience is exhilaratingly lucid…[She] writes with great compassion about the sleeplessness of others, of those who do not have a safe place to rest…[and] writes with such frankness the reader is jolted, again and again, by the life force that thrums through this memoir. Sleepless is an achingly beautiful and thrilling read. It awakens the mind to new planes of thought.’

Saturday Paper

‘Dancing on and off the page, appearing, disappearing, and re-emerging throughout her book, Darrieussecq spins a heady web...Intoxicating and disorientating, her style works perfectly when she writes about the spiralling anxiety of insomnia, and the dizzy voids of sleeplessness. It lets her capture the internal cacophony, the sense of isolation and the tide of dread that destabilises those of us who battle for sleep...Darrieussecq’s writing is faultless.’

Conversation

‘Splendidly translated by Penny Hueston, this is a brilliantly creative and playful meditation on the disturbing reality of insomnia, one that weaves together Darrieussecq’s own experiences with quotations, images and biographical anecdotes from other sleep-deprived writers.’

Guardian

‘The translation by Penny Hueston is pellucid, with snatches of prose-poetry that evoke the limbo land the sleepless inhabit...The book is a treasure trove of literary fragments. One of the solaces of literature is the realisation that others in times long gone have felt what we are feeling now...Darrieussecq conjures a cultural kaleidoscope...Darrieussecq shares with us an elegant journey that finds beauty in the despair of insomnia.’

Spectator