This book is a good read and very well written. As more and more people fall asleep the suspense builds as to how many people it will affect and whether or not it is contagious. There is very little though to tell how people felt when they woke up again weeks later. I feel that so much more could have been done with such a good plot idea and that there could have been a better ending.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

I cannot praise this book enough. I loved it so, so much. The comparison to Jeffrey Eugenides is completely justified, and there is something so magical and absorbing about this incredible book. I loved every minute and felt heartbroken to finish it. It's extraordinarily clever, moving and innovative, and my investment in each of the characters was huge. A beautiful book that deserves to be a huge success.

I really struggled to get through this book. Yes, the story takes you on a tale of a pandemic of sorts, virus yet unknown, but this subject I feel has been done better in other books out there.

The descriptive text dragged on for me with not enough happening and too much about family life, the love of a mother, college life. Does this book want to be a master of emotion or of suspense? It just struck me as confusing in style and structure.

I read to the end to find out what the cause was, but I kept avoiding my Kindle as I didn't really want to keep reading it. That was sad.

Santa Lora, California on comes a College campus Rebecca comes back early from a party feeling really tired like she has never felt before. She falls asleep into a deep slumber. The next day roommate Mei tries to wake her up but, she never wakes up. Then suddenly, other classmates fall asleep. There seems to be a virus and they think is airborne. The college is closed and everyone is quarantined and eventually, nearly the whole town goes into a deep slumber. They sleep dreaming of the future or the past, or things that have not been. We then meet different residents of the small town and how they cope during this epidemic.
I was really looking forward to reading this, as its not usually type of fiction I read. I like the premise of this story and I thought it was beautifully written It reminded me of all them films about an apocalypse a bit like World War Z. I liked all the characters of this story. The only difference for this story was that nobody panicked. The residents of the town just took what came. Nobody fought when the town was closed off and nobody could get out or in and people in masks came and took people away, nothing was said. The story could have more depth to it. Four stars from me

I thought The Dreamers was excellent. It’s a little hard to put my finger on exactly why, but I found it wholly involving, very thoughtful and genuinely touching in places.

A mystery illness begins to spread through a college campus in a remote California town. People fall asleep and, although they are obviously dreaming, they simply can’t be woken and the illness spreads quickly, causing national worry. The story sounds like a tediously familiar old trope, but Karen Thompson Walker makes it fresh and original. She does this partly by giving us the stories of a variety of characters affected in one way or another by the illness, which she does beautifully. These are recognisable people with recognisable emotions and responses, and Thompson Walker paints them beautifully. She catches the small, everyday events and internal responses which so define a life and a person so that I became very involved with each one of them.

Her other great strength is her style. Her prose is beautifully poised; it is unflashy but has a poetic rhythm to it and the whole book seems to have a quiet, almost soothing pulse to it, even when describing extreme events. This antithesis of the normal style of catastrophe fiction is extraordinarily effective and for me gave these events a far greater poignancy. It is just a pleasure to read.

As to what it’s actually about...well, it’s hard to be precise, but it’s important. Thompson Walker has things to say about the human condition, the wondrous complexity of the physical world and of the mind, the haphazard nature of existence and about what reality may be to a human consciousness. There are many fine, affecting stories here but one in particular about a “Dreamer” who is pregnant comes to a conclusion which I found truly moving and very thought-provoking.

I’m struggling to express clearly why I liked The Dreamers so much, but I did. I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

(My thanks to Scribner UK for an ARC via NetGalley.)

“This isn’t Karen Thompson Walker’s first foray into a mysterious dystopia that follows a varied range of characters, as The Age of Miracles had similar themes. But The Dreamers is sharper and even stranger, with an intriguing hook: Students at a California college dorm fall prey to an epidemic where they sleep…and sleep…and sleep. Soon enough the illness spreads. The Dreamers raises interesting questions about community, and is nail-bitingly gripping.”

I understand the author's debut was very popular (I haven't read it myself), so I expect there to be plenty of interest in this book. Unfortunately, I wasn't too keen myself. This is ostensibly about a virus which effects a whole town in California, causing sufferers to fall asleep (they seem to be dreaming, which makes this different from a coma) and eventually causing the town to be sealed off. However in practice it is more about people's relationships and the author seems to be particularly obsessed with the theme of parenthood. One thread is about a tiresome couple who are obsessed with their baby to the exclusion of all else. There is a very strange plotline about a young girl who is pregnant while "asleep" which made me feel very uncomfortable. As if to underline this pervasive theme, the plot climaxes with the most likable character dying because her boyfriend chooses to save a baby instead!

I have seen a lot of comparisons between this book and Station Eleven, which I do not agree with at all - this book is much more sentimental and less interested in describing the effects/origin etc. of the pandemic at its centre. Instead I would recommend it to those who enjoyed The End We Start From as it has a similar "lyrical" style and obsession with parenthood.

The plot of The Dreamers is absolutely fascinating: some college students in a small town in America start contracting a strange virus which puts everyone to sleep. More and more people get affected by this peculiar virus until the town is turned into an almost abandoned place of a dystopic future.

Walker's prose is lyrical and mesmerising. Although the story is told from many characters' perspectives, she manages to capture their intricate feelings and reveal their complex background stories with a remarkable ease. I have to admit that I was most interested in the virus itself, as it seemed to affect each person in a very different way, as well as in the notion of dreams that the author presented. Dreams can hide a yearning for the glorious past or they can reveal glimpses of the future, however exciting yet terrifying that may be. I would have liked to know more about the dreaming virus and the effect it had on those people who managed to survive, since I felt the ending didn't fully satisfy me.

All in all, it was a book with a very fascinating premise and beautiful writing that I would recommend.

Weird and intense. I simply couldn’t put this down until I found out what happened. Genuinely brilliant writing.

I've been waiting for Karen Thompson Walker to write another book So when I saw this on Netgalley I knew I needed it. The Dreamers is about a mysterious sleeping virus that sweeps a small town in California. The infected seem to be Dreaming. We follow two new parents, two teenagers and two young girls, we see how they cope when their world's come crashing down.
An unexpected beautiful story.

‘How can anyone say for sure that the other life was the dream, and not this one?’

Having read, and enjoyed, Walker’s previous novel ‘The Age of Miracles’ I was greatly looking forward to her new book – and I was not disappointed. There is a current debate about the use of present tense in many modern novels: some see it as a blight on literature, others as a way of freeing aspects of the text and story. For many readers this might be the most obvious/jarring aspect of the book for the first few pages, and some might not get over it! For me, I think it works in this instance; it adds an almost ethereal tone to the telling of the story, but also adds an immediacy and a pace to the book as events gain momentum. Here there is no distance in which to reflect and consider the events, for the reader is caught up in the action as much as the characters.

This is the story of a sleeping virus that starts in one floor of a college dormitory and then spreads throughout the sleepy Californian town of Santa Lora. There is no cause found, there is no answer to what is happening – or indeed why. The book concentrates on a small number of characters: a father and his two daughters; two of the students from the dorm; a psychiatrist sent to treat the victims; parents of a new-born child struggling to cope. As their lives are turned upside down by the outbreak, we sense the growing paranoia, the conspiracy theories, the bewilderment of a town caught up in a complete breakdown of society: streets are empty, infected houses are marked with an X, residents are interned in camps, victims lie undiscovered and die. This is a modern society imploding, reverting to olden days of plague and Spanish Flu. And all the while the victims lie asleep, eyelids flickering in REM sleep as their minds produce ‘more activity than has ever been recorded in any human brain’.

Walker deliberately leaves the questions unanswered, and even as the outbreak ends and the victims awaken, we are left with a tangible sense of wonder: some have dreamt of the past, some of the future, many feel like they have been asleep for much longer than they actually have. We are left with a sense of time turning in on itself, distorting: ‘past, present, future – a physicist might say that these distinctions are illusions anyway’.

For all of the action that takes place – and the book does move along at a good pace – this is a meditative, dream-like book to match the subject matter. It doesn’t provide easy answers, and we are left with a sense of having experienced something just beyond our understanding. The characters are believable and sympathetic, the growing sense of paranoia and fear is palpable, and as ever with Walker the writing is beautifully crafted. This is a great book, one to make you think and marvel that in the great advances of science and technology, there is so much more that is unknown, and wonderful, and horrific. Somewhere between 4 and 5 stars, depending on how generous I am. Definitely a recommended book for everyone!

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC in return for an unbiased and honest review.)

This book is compulsively readable, well-composed and full of vivid characters – this alone would make me happy, but on top of that, Thompson Walker manages to smartly tackle issues like the tension between human fear and solidarity as well as the difference between time that can be measured objectively and the human experience of time. In her story, the outbreak of a sleeping virus causesthe whole town of Santa Lora to be quarantined. The reader learns about the progression of this <i>“pestilence”</i> (hello, Camus) from different points of view: There are college students, a young family, a psychologist,a prepper and his two daughters, a gay professor, an immigrant family, and many other characters crossing through this narrative.

It is impressive how Thompson Walker dives into the mindsof the city’s inhabitants who can’t escape and are often torn between existential fear and the urge to help others. Empathy and the very longing for human connection become dangerous as the virus starts to spread –but after all, shutting out the world would also be a form of death. In this context, Thompson Walker’s meditation on the meaning of dreams as manifestations of the subconscious becomes even more interesting.

Time as clocks measure it (and there are quite a few clocks mentioned in the story) is not the same kind of time we experience in sleep, and it’s not even the same time we experience in our minds, because our lives are so highly influenced by past events that are deeply ingrained in our brains, by the way we feel about the current moment,and our anticipations regarding the future, rooted in logical, emotional or magical thinking. All these aspects of how we experience time and ultimately life – a life span being the ultimate time measurement – are reflected in the dreams the people who fall ill live through, and the way the author achieves this proves an astonishing degree of narrative control.

So picking up this book, you’re reading something smart while having a lot of fun – what’s not to like?

I've been caught out once again by a book written in present tense. Why, oh why is this a thing?

The story is about a strange virus that makes people fall asleep and not wake up, but remain dreaming. It was an interesting premise, but because present tense is so difficult to read I couldn't really get into the story.

Some interesting ideas in there, but it's just not for me.

I'm so happy to have read this book, as it was highly original and impactful. I couldn't put it down. I really don't see original ideas executed so well, so often.
This is a story of people living in a town, who fall into a deep sleep. While sleeping, they seem to have very vivid dreams as if they were experiencing it. So, it becomes their reality.

You can imagine, in such story, writing skills is very important, and the author definitely has risen to this challenge. I loved how descriptive and vivid it was. I felt a certain energy that keeps you reading without putting the book down. The pace was not the fastest, but I also enjoyed savouring it slowly.
So, I'd definitely recommend it.

Thanks so much to Netgalley and the publisher for granting access in exchange for an honest review.

A mysterious sleeping sickness spreads across an isolated California college town. It starts with the students and then spreads out to the wider community. There is nothing wrong with the dreamers apart from not waking up – they are in perfect health. But as the town succumbs to sleep fear spreads and there are fewer people to care for the sleepers. Quarantine is put in place and people start to panic. The outside world shuts them in and conspiracy and hoax theories emerge about this town in the middle of nowhere.

The Dreamers is a wonderful book, itself having a dream-like quality at times. It follows a number of characters through the epidemic – the source of which no-one is sure. The strange fact that when scanned the dreamers’ brains show more brain activity than any normal human brain makes you wonder of what they are dreaming. What holds these people so strongly in sleep? Those awake are a very telling look at human nature, with their approach to others varying wildly – some bond and risk their waking life to help others, some hide away hoarding their resources, some lash out in fear at those keeping them penned in. It is a fascinating read with a beautiful flow to the writing.

The Dreamers is surreal novel about how little we understand of our minds, especially our dreaming selves. What is the difference between what is real and what is dreamt when we can feel and experience things so clearly in dreams?

It all begins when one college girl, in a small town in California, falls into a sleep from which no one can wake her. Slowly, over time, more and more people fall sick, drifting into sleep at times and places that leave them undiscovered, in danger, or eventually found and hooked up to drips and feeding tubes while people wait and hope for them to wake up.

I’m glad there is a quotation from Saramago’s Blindness at the start of the novel because there is a connection between the two stories. The shared paranoia, the horror that people feel when their predictable daily lives no longer unfold in ways they expect. They also share that exploration of morality, of how you chose to save some people over others.

We follow a series of different people and families as they each undergo different experiences of the sickness. There is a young family with a baby whose donated breast milk was contaminated. There are two motherless girls whose father, a paranoid man well prepared for the apocalypse, leaves them with a cellar filled with food to last just such a crisis. A college professor who wishes he could have his husband back from the nursing home. A young student who falls in love with a man determined to see the world through a clear moral lens that chooses the good of the many, the good of the young over the good of the one or the old. There is some comfort in this morality but not for the college girl herself. There is a psychologist who is caught in quarantine, miles away from her little girl who hardly recognises her when she finally comes home. And there is another college girl whose brief sexual abandon, born of the fear of the sickness, grows into a child.

The strange thing about the dreamers is their rapid eye movement and, if and when they wake, the clarity of their dreams. These dreams distort the waking world’s understanding of time and shape their futures in unpredictable ways. Some say they have seen the future. Some claim to have relived the past. Others still feel they have lived whole lives while the rest of the world watched them sleep. Who is to say what we believe to be real now is not in fact the dream?

It’s an interesting novel. Compelling and provocative. I didn’t love it though and I’m not really sure why. I think it has something to do with a sense of distance that I feel between myself and the characters. The curtain that folds over my dreaming self, that I push through to the cold light of day, seems to close over my connection to the characters as if I’m emotionally kept from them, observing them like a clinician as they doze their days away. I don’t think everyone will feel this, or if they do it may enhance their connection to the world of the novel, and I’m certain The Dreamers is a book many will love.

This speculative novel imagines a plague that starts in a college town and sends each of its victims to sleep one by one. I was impressed by how Thompson Walker sustained its eerie, paranoid atmosphere - especially as I'm not at all interested in the psychology of dreaming. The Dreamers has little to add to the many other stories that have already been told about devastating plagues, but its use of sleep as the central agent of destruction plays cleverly on deep-rooted fears of sleep as 'the little death', and how in sleep we may not be ourselves ourselves. Darting about between several groups of characters, the very short chapters maintain tension, and I was particularly drawn in by the story of two young sisters and their survivalist father, and the couple with a newborn baby who were once praying to get more sleep, and are now terrified of it. Compelling, if not groundbreaking.

I've had to give this a day to sink in before writing about it. It has stayed with me, and I think it's because of the dreamlike style that it's written in. Which is apt, because this is a story of an illness, a virus, that causes those who contract it to fall asleep and stay asleep for days, weeks or months. There are even those who die whilst asleep.
This story is told from multiple perspectives, which I really liked: the dreamers are all affected in different ways, even if the result is the same.
I can honestly say that I found this impossible to put down. It's one of those books that you have to keep reading because you don't want to miss anything (yes, this really is a 'thing' with me, and yes, I know it's not likely to happen). It has been compared to Station Eleven (one of my favourite books), and whilst it's not the same, I can see where they're coming from. Either way, I really enjoyed it.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy of this book.

The set up is excellent, and I loved the first 100 pages. The writing style is beautiful and dreamy, and like The Age of Miracles, has many, well-observed friendships between girls, and women that felt both real and refreshing. However, the novel also poses loads of questions that never get answered, which left me feeling unsatisfied, and the ending, while interesting, felt a bit like a sleight of hand.

For fans of Girlfriend In A Coma by Douglas Copeland, or The Book Of M by Peng Shepherd.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book as it far exceeded my expectations.
The story follows a group of people who are all live or work in the town of Santa Lora. There is an outbreak of an illness which is putting its victims into a deep sleep.
With the town on lockdown the story follows 3 groups of people and how the illness affects them and how they cope with the lockdown.
Story has lots of twists and turns and some surprising moments. Book was well written and could be perfectly believable.
I would recommend this book for all fans of thrillers and sci-fi.