I had to force myself to finish this book. It had all the elements I usually enjoy (apocalyptic threat, human reactions etc) but the story just didn't seem to come together for me. The ending was particularly unsatisfyingwith no apparent explanation for events.

I really, really enjoyed this. It is reminiscent of several stories i've read/watched before but it is still gripping and exciting. I thought the way the author has chosen to switch periodically from character to character was great in that we got insight into how the virus started and how different people reacted. It was definitely interesting how people reacted to it and I thought it was a good balance of being believable and so shocking.

The only thing I could possibly say I was disappointed in was the ending - I thought it was a little anticlimactic, although I'm not sure which, if any, kind of ending would be fitting so maybe it's for the best.

Would definitely read again though.

A previously unknown virus appears on the university campus of an isolated Californian town. The victims fall asleep and cannot be woken. Those caring for the sick succumb to the illness themselves. Eventually the federal government takes the step, unprecedented in over a hundred years, of surrounding the town with a cordon sanitaire enforced by the military.

Against this backdrop the novel follows a group of characters as their community disintegrates around them and the virus draws ever nearer. Some of the victims do eventually wake but they struggle to differentiate the reality they encounter from their dreams and this confusion is mirrored in the book's branching narratives, some of which, it becomes clear, may only be taking place within the sleeping minds of the victims.

Like The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker's previous novel, The Dreamers explores the assumptions and rituals that hold a society together and how these can so easily be unpicked. There's a plaintive quality to the understated but beautifully-crafted writing writing that left me feeling slightly stunned and with a lingering sense of the fragility of the world

A strange story of a post apocalyptic town. There is Mei, a quiet reserved student, Ben & Annie the new parents, young Sara & Libby with their father. All characters I feel I got to know. All at the mercy of this strange virus. This is science fantasy at its best. Fiction with glimpses of reality. What if?

I loved The Age of Miracles, and found this to be just as compelling. It is a beautifully written story of a virus which hits a small town and sends its victims into a dreamful sleep. Some die, some recover, and the virus plays itself out and moves on. Within this premise are the human stories of the victims and their families, coupled with a touch of mysticism. Are the dreams predictions of the future?

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy. This was beautifully written, ethereal, weird and captivating. Love that it was told from multiple perspectives and I raced through it as I cared about the characters and was intrigued about the mystery of the illness.

When a strange illness takes over a town, one by one, people begin to succumb to the mysterious symptoms.

I LOVED this book. I read it in one go and was completely absorbed - I loved the premise, the writing, the characters, everything about it. As I followed the story of individuals, I found myself floating along with the vague sense of panic that grips the town - it felt real. Walker's descriptions are eerie and powerful, unsettling somehow, as if we're in the town, yet disconnected at the same time.

I loved how this novel tells a dystopian story, yet it doesn't feel far-fetched or impossible. The people feel real, their reactions feel real, the reaction of the authorities and the surrounding country isn't impossible, and I think that is what makes it so unsettling. It's set in our times, and I was left thinking that each twist in the story was plausible, yet in some way removed.

This book is fantastic. Thoroughly recommended!

I hadn't realised this was by the same author as the Age of Miracles. I would have been even more keen to read had I known.
This,like the last, felt refreshing,a new idea.
Admittedly we've probably all read about a mystery virus and isolation for it...
But the idea of a sleeping sickness really intrigued me... with few signs it was coming and for a good part of the book,less signs it was leaving.
Throw into that ,people of different ages and backgrounds and how they'd all survive,in a town on lock down.
I raced through it.
It almost felt like a bonus to then have some people wake and talk of disorientation and the dreams they had and what effect they were to have on them.
I'll be telling people to buy this one for sure.

I really enjoyed this book and Karen Thompson Walker is a great writer. If there was a half star I would have rated it 3.5. It tells the story of a town in which residents, mysteriously start falling asleep. It becomes an epidemic, and the situation is declared a national crisis.

My main issue was with the structure. It took too long to get to the meat of the story, and then the ending felt rushed. There were quite a few questions left unanswered, and whilst I suspect that was the author’s intention, for me this felt disappointing. Still a good read though.

A small college town in California is hit with a sleeping sickness that starts in a college girls dorm room. The sickness spreads eventaully throughout the town as we follow the lives of a range of residents: thecollege outsider Mei, Mathhew an idealistic maverick student, Rebecca a religious student enjoying sone new found freedom, a young couple of lecturers new to town and with a new baby, their strange neighbour who is a widower and survivalist with two daughters and an older gay couple . We follow their lives through some flashbacks, the present and the dreams they have when they sleep. Are they echoes of the past, glimpses of the future or an alternative lived reality?

I enjoyed this book, it was really well written and held all the threads together. well for the most part I felt that the gay couple were a bit underwritten and also that Mei, who I was rooting for from the first page got a bit lost in the narrative towards the end. Catherine, the psychologist's story was also under developed. but these are minor quibbles. The prose flows gently almost as somnolent at times as that of the sleepers and their dreams. It was a great bedtime read. I'll definitely be checking out this writers other books.

A small Californian town is under threat when a mysterious virus starts spreading from the local college; people fall asleep and can't be woken. Karen Thompson Walker handles the material very efficiently, building up an atmosphere of disbelief that escalates gradually until the town is cut off from the outside world by a 'cordon sanitaire'. No one is allowed in; no one can leave. The disease affects everyone, from the smallest new-born baby to the elderly and confused living in a nursing home. There are echoes of Camus' The Plague and of Rip Van Winkle, laced with theories about sleep and dreaming from ancient Greece via Freud to the latest findings of neuroscientists. All against a quietly smouldering background of global warming: the lake is drying up, trees are slowly dying and the whole area is at the risk of devastating forest fires.
The sense that this illness affects all is echoed by the way the story is told from several viewpoints with no one central character: a young fresher who doesn't fit in; two young sisters with an eccentric father; a professor grieving for his partner and a young couple patching together their marriage with a new baby amongst others.
The Dreamers is a subtle story where reality and dreaming become mixed, and the decisions we take in how to live our lives are put under the microscope. A quietly devastating page-turner.

It is not often that the premise of the book is so completely captured within the content. But this is one of those times. Walker writes like a waking dream; a muted, seen through clouded glass distancing throughout the novel. And it works perfectly. As we read about the sleeping sickness travelling through the community, we feel the slow, sucking sleep of the dreamers. We feel the paranoia and tension - but through a glass darkly, so to speak. And it evokes such a sense of veiled horror at the inevitability of sleep - which is probably the cleverest part of the novel. We all must sleep. Every one of us. Not only that, but we must sleep at least once every couple of days. To have something so essential turned into a potential enemy is a potent thing.
I'd say Walker evokes some of the classic distancing of Atwood at times, where we feel this could be happening right now, or in the future, or maybe it happened long ago and this is just the record of it, and it works to good effect in The Dreamers.
I would recommend this book to readers that like Atwood, or readers that enjoy the feeling of being pulled hazily through a story, without a sharp and defined beginning middle and end.

I love literary fiction with a speculative twist (I don't think anybody is surprised to hear that) and I heard absolutely amazing things about this book before starting it. The book does a wonderful way of depicting a potential world-ending plague without the bells and whistles of post-apocalyptic fiction. Set in a fictional college town in California where one after the other people start falling asleep and not waking up again, this book has a fairy-talesque mood that I just adored.

For me the book worked best in the overarching moments, when the narrative flits between different people and never comes close enough to add humanity to them. I found the prose in those sections stunning and the distance created worked really well for me. Here it read more like a parable than a classical science fiction book and I just loved this a whole lot. I adored how the authors opened up the closed narrative to give glimpses of the outside world and her depiction of the greater world's reaction to the unknown illness was believable.

Karen Thompson Walker emphasizes the relationship between parents and their children, which I obviously enjoyed, but my favourite relationship was that between two sisters who were left alone after their doomsday-prepper father succumbs to the illness. Sibling relationships are a particular weakness of mine and those two sisters felt very real. I do think that the book was not always successful when changing gear from the birds-eye perspective to a more closely observed narrative style, but I enjoyed the reading experience immensely nonetheless.

The Dreamers was a lyrical, beautifully immersive novel, taking the premise of an unknown virus spreading throughout an unsuspecting small town and within that exploring intriguing themes of time and memory.

It starts at a college, a girl goes to sleep and simply does not wake up. Like domino’s more fall, slowly spreading outwards – scientists, Doctors, specialists, arriving in droves but nobody knows what this sickness is or how to cure it. The one certain thing is that all these sleepers are busy dreaming…

Through the eyes of various town inhabitants, we watch this strange and unpredictable illness occur, see the town cut off, feel the low key panic, the helplessness and the worry. As the outside world watches, time is an elusive thing for these few, as it is it seems for those struck by the virus. It is a clever narrative, a fully formed character drama – the emphasis being very much on the human condition, how we distinguish dreams from reality, if indeed we can at all…and how we cope with untenable situations where resolution seems impossible.

I loved this because it ignored the usual trope of people fighting over scraps, hurting each other, but showed how we both isolate ourselves and come together in times of trauma. The differing personalities we meet give a snapshot of time, an enclosed event where only those in it can know it. The author gives outcomes but allows the reader to consider the possibilities – It is melancholy and thought provoking.

I loved it. A little dark delight.

Recommended.

Haunting and lyrical. Very rare is a good book surrounding an outbreak that doesn’t focus on the actual science behind it, but this one did I just fine.

A highly contagious virus is taking out the community of Santa Lora. First to succumb are students at the local college, all falling into a deep dreamy sleep from which they cannot be woken.

Even with the college grounds in quarantine, inevitably the virus escapes into the wider community.

A wealth of characters tie the reader into the story: Ben, his wife Annie and their new baby Grace; Mei and Matthew – students, still awake, and trying their best to help others; Nathaniel and his two daughters who’ve already prepared for an apocalyptic scenario with a stockpile of goods in their basement.

Loved this read – I cared deeply about all the characters, and enjoyed the philosophical slant to the narrative – exploring dreaming and the unconscious. Definitely an author to pick up again.

"O Sleep, come for me, I will go quietly,
where the roof doesn’t leak in my heart.

O Sleep, come for me, I’m a boat, sprung a leak,
I’ll hide and you’ll seek a new start for me.
Til dawn, I’ll be too gone to care how grey the day is.
The dreams that it chases away, they stay asleep.

O Sleep, come for me, I will come willingly,
like a leaf from a tree in October..."
- Lisa Hannigan, O Sleep

The Dreamers is the sophomore effort from Karen Thompson Walker, author of the novel The Age of Miracles. The story opens with Mei, a student in a university in the small fictional town of Santa Lora, California, who discovers that her roommate has fallen into a deep sleep that she cannot be woken from. At the hospital, it is revealed that this bout of deep sleep is a sickness - a contagious virus - that renders its victims comatose (in the sleep-sense) for weeks or months on end. The sickness soon spreads throughout the university grounds before spilling over into the local neighborhoods and small town, affecting a host of characters: more of Mei's classmates and more university students; two local children, Sara and Libby, and their father; Ben and Annie, a young married couple, and their three-week-old daughter, Grace; Nathaniel, a university faculty member. We don't know how its victims are chosen, but the sickness seems to affect people of all ages and all walks of life, ensnaring them in a perpetual sleep that triggers life-altering dreams. And that's what is so interesting here: these victims, in their sleep, display an unusual amount of brain activity and they dream. They dream about the past, about the present and, interestingly, about the future. Each state of dreaming is unique to the dreamer, just as the virus affects each victim in a different way.

I think this is a very well written and constructed novel. The author handles this small-town catastrophe very well. As panic beings to build in Santa Lora, a quarantine is established. Classes are cancelled, the number of cases increases and food supplies run low. But nothing here is overdone. Just like the dreamers themselves, there is a quiet and a gentleness to this virus, and a subtlety to how Thompson Walker portrays this. There is a normality to the chaos, which we are regularly reminded of, and that maintains the humanness here. Parents must care for their children, pet owners must feed their pets and teenagers still fall in love. Life goes on all around Santa Lora, just as life goes on for the victims who dream, in whatever form that may be.

There is certainly a dystopian, apocalyptic feel to this novel but I would class it more as character-driven science-fiction story with fairytale elements. The prose and the story are hypnotic and the book is filled with wonderfully emotive passages that make this a truly memorable read. I particularly loved the sections where Ben is left to look after his newborn daughter when his wife falls asleep. The constant attachment he is forced to endure with his dependent and vulnerable baby is both a blessing and a struggle, and it was heart-wrenching to watch him try to cope alone with both the huge grief he was experiencing and the mundane activities of the everyday - the new baby sleep schedule, the feeding, the changing. It really struck a cord with me. And I find that typical, now, of Thompson Walker's work: she is a beautiful writer, one that has the ability to evoke true emotion in her balance of the weird and the normal.

The Dreamers is a stunning novel; a mesmerising story about life and love, dreams and reality, and the nature of consciousness. I highly recommend it. Four and a half stars.

Thank you for an advance ARC in return for an honest review.
The Dreamers follows a small US town, struck down with a highly infections sleeping sickness. There is only one road into the town, and only one road and as the sickness spreads through the town the authorities put the town in quarantine, and sends in the Military.
This is a very quiet, calm novel, almost as dreamy as The Dreamers in the title. The narrative is told from different perspectives, who interact with each other such is the smallness of the story. The characters are beautifully drawn out, and the pace is perfect. I really enjoyed this and was particularly saddened that not all the main characters made it to the end of the novel.

Definitely recommends, and will be looking up Karen Thompson Walker’s previous novels.

Easy four stars.

I'm obsessed with this book. Knew I would be by that blurb! And The Dreamers did not disappoint, the writing style is brilliant and the story is mesmerizing and terrifying.

A beautiful and brilliant novel written by the NYT bestselling book The Age of Miracles. Karen Thompson Walker takes you on a dystopian journey set in Santa Lora, a small town in America where a mystery contagion is causing people to fall asleep and they cannot be woken again, some people live, some people die the sleep virus is spreading and its spreading fast.
The novel starts at a school in Santa Lora where Mei finds her room-mate asleep. She assumes it is from a heavy night out and leaves her to sleep peacefully all day. She becomes concerned when Rebecca doesn’t wake up after 12 hours, she tries to rouse her and nothing… this is the beginning of the virus, Rebecca is the first victim. As the book goes on more and more people catch the sleep virus, at first it is just the school, then nurses, doctors slip into sleep until the whole community is in panic that it could be them next. The book shows different perspectives throughout, there is Mei and students in the school, A father and his two children Libby & Sara, the family next door couple Annie, Ben and baby Grace and a few others are sprinkled within the story, but these feel like the main characters. Most of the characters intertwine at some stage in the book even if they didn’t know each other.

My favourite characters were the father and the two girls. They seemed to have been from quite a poor background and you could tell they were missing a mother such as one of the girls gets their period and their father doesn’t have any sanitary products in the house. The father had always been expecting something like this to happen.
“No one in this town knows a goddamn thing about what’s coming, he says to himself or maybe to the girls”

He already had a basement full off food, provisions, blankets, water and gas masks, but even the most prepared can’t hide from this mystery contagion. I enjoyed reading their part of the story the most especially when the girls are more vulnerable, how they cope and survive trying to escape from the virus, yet they were always happy to help other people in the community even if it put them at risk. For children of 10-11 years old they were wise beyond their years.
I saw this novel being described as a “slow-paclypse” I understand that it isn’t a full-on action-packed thriller, yet everything about it kept me reading and wanting to know more so I felt it was “fast paced” in its own dream like subtle way. The plot always kept me interested and I was invested in all the characters, as a reader you didn’t know who was going to fall asleep next so when you are attached to the families involved you want to know how they will survive without certain family members. Also, as a reader you were just as clueless about the virus as the characters, you didn’t know what it was or where it come from, how it is being spread, if the sleepers will wake up again, what they are dreaming about or what happens to them when they fall asleep. What I really loved is, not until the very end of the novel do you get an insight to what it was like for a sleeper, what they were dreaming of and how it felt to be asleep. The not knowing anything kept me intrigued.
I loved the originality of the virus how it wasn’t just some flesh-eating bug or zombie apocalypse, people feared sleep. Sleeping is something we as humans do on a daily basis and don’t think twice about, how Thompson turned something so natural into something that caused so much, chaos, panic and worry was really fascinating. It was interesting to see how a town coped with something spreading, how they barricaded the roads, so no one could come in or out, how they tried to quarantine the “sick” and how they adapted their surroundings for instance they turned the library into an extra hospital. I kept thinking whilst reading this, if the virus was something like Zombies or EBOLA the contamination would have been contained faster and people would have realised how it was spread. With the contagion being people just falling asleep with no real signs of symptoms beforehand, as first I don’t think people understood what it was or how fast it could spread. It reminded me of a book I have read previously called Nod by Adrian Barnes, in his novel the virus is reversed, where by people can’t ever fall asleep again, so everyone becomes sleep depraved and goes mad, a rather chaotic novel quite the opposite of this sleeping town of Santa Lora.

Overall, I absolutely adored this novel, if you enjoy dystopian, sci-fi novels this book is for you. It is beautifully written, thought provoking and perfectly dreamlike. This novel is not out until January 2019, but here is an Amazon link for you to save on your wish lists. In the mean time I will be purchasing Karen Thompson Walker’s other novel The Age of Miracles