A mysterious sleeping sickness sweeps over the small college town of Santa Lora. At first, just a few students are affected, but the virus spreads rapidly and soon much of the town is affected and the whole place is in quarantine. This book follows the experiences of several groups of people,. exploring relationships and the fragile bonds between the characters.

I really enjoyed the author's previous book, The Age of Miracles, and was pleased to find that with The Dreamers she has produces something similarly captivating that stays with you long after the last page.

Told from multiple perspectives, The Dreamers explores the outbreak of a rapid-spread sleeping epidemic - starting with a single female student at college, soon entire families are dropping suddenly into a sleep from which they can't be woken. No one can see an end to the epidemic or a cure, and resources for supporting an entire afflicted town are dwindling...

Character-driven rather than action-focused, the book was completely compelling, atmospheric and, ultimately, haunting. Karen Thompson Walker draws you into a world that is terrifying in its realistic handling of her characterisations and the epidemic response. At times the book has a neutral, observational tone of voice, lending to its realism and heightening the characters' fears as people continue to fall ill. I was completely hooked not just to see how the book ended, but how the characters continued to develop and cope with their ordeals.

This is an ethereal story that feels somehow like it could really happen... Brilliant concept, brilliantly followed through.

If you enjoyed 'Station Eleven', you'll love this too!

Really lyrical writing and lovely phrasing. A delight to read, and a fascinating concept with human characters - never quite resolved, leaving the reader wondering 'what if'

Now there's a guarantee I am giving to you: If you liked Station Eleven you will love this book.

I have never heard of Karen Thompson Walker before, but felt intrigued by the book description on NetGalley. I am so glad I have read this book. It is one of the fabulous finds, a book you pick by instinct and left you amazed.

I can summarise this as a borderline science fiction character drama- just like Station Eleven it swirls around lives of a bunch of people after a catastrophe- although in this book it's not a world-wide event, but a small town disaster, Walker masterfully delivering the intense feel of a lock down. There is sadness in this book but it's not cringe, beautiful as if a form of art.

Set in fictional university town Santa Lora in California, the book starts when some college girls fall asleep and fail to wake up. They dream. But no one knows what's causing this. Story moves between different point of views, Sara and Libby with their paranoid dad, a young married couple, Ben and Annie with their new born baby girl Grace, two castaway college students, Mei and Matthew, and a man named Nathaniel. I found almost all character's point of views really enjoyable and loved the way the story was delivered. The last chapter is one to remember.

I personally think the situation of a virus spread was handled excellently- no exaggeration, o unnecessary drama, as if a dish with all proper ingredients and a spot on pinch of spices. If you like psychological books with touch of sci-fi I will highly recommend.
5 stars and will definitely read Walker again.

A very similar storyline to Stephen King’s Sleeping Beauties that I was afraid it would be a poor shadow but no this, though similar, was an excellent novel in its own right and perhaps more poignant then SK’s. the characters were beautifully drawn and I felt for them completely.

A sound four star read.

A great book. It grabbed and sucked me in as soon as the first sentence was read. It did have echoes of Wyndham and others but stood up brilliantly for me as a unique premise. The words remained with me as I went about my day. I found myself pondering what it would be like to “fall asleep” for so long and have amazing, weird dreams. Premonitions perhaps? I’d like to think so. The narrative flowed beautifully, the sense of unease increased slowly giving me a lot of “oh no”! moments.

I enjoyed it immensely and I can see this as a film.

The Dreamers by Katherine Thompson Walker

Published by Scribner


Official blurb :

The eagerly awaited new novel from the author of The Age of Miracles.

Imagine a world where sleep could trap you, for days, for weeks, months... A world where you could even die of sleep rather than in your sleep.

Karen Thompson Walker's second novel is the stunning story of a Californian town's epidemic of perpetual sleep.

My opinion:

This is set in a fictional town of Santa Lora in California at the local College. Kara falls asleep but then doesn’t wake and is taken to hospital.....then others at the college start to sleep. The doctors complete tests and scans and can find nothing, only they are asleep and dreaming. Hundreds in the town then do the same and it’s put down to a virus. The hospitals are full, with patients in library’s and community spaces and the military control a quarantine.
Katherine Thompson Walker, writes of those left awake, their struggles in the chaos, as more and more succumb to the sleep.
I felt the characters were well written, especially Mei and Ben...made me weep at times.

This is a tale of the perception of reality, time and dreams, not in a scientific way, but a human feeling. If after experiencing a lifetime in a dream, would you want to wake up to reality and experience that loss?....I wonder!

I would like to thank the Author/the Publishers/NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for a fair and honest review

A college town in California is hit a by a sleeping virus. It starts in a dorm with a girl who does not wake up, she is taken away but then it becomes apparent that the sickness is spreading and the dorm is put into quarantine.

The cast of characters grows from Mei and Matthew, two college students, to the father who has been preparing for a world disaster for some time, the new parents, a college professor, a foetus and a doctor. Each character gives an insight into the state of the town, the country and into the character of the virus.

Those hit with the illness have vivid dreams; are these dreams of the future, memories or just wishful thinking?

I particularly enjoyed the blossoming relationship between Mei and Matthew, with the twist in the tale as Matthew acts according to his beliefs on the value of life.

A thought provoking, great read! It is one of those books that I will remember, think about for a long time to come and definitely recommend!

I loved Thompson Walker's [book:The Age of Miracles|13447533] and here again she deals with people put under pressure by an unexpected external crisis.

But where the first book focused down on Julia and offered up a coming-of-age tale that takes place under extraordinary circumstances, here there isn't enough of an over-arching story to hold the whole thing together. The narrative is split this time across many (too many?) characters, creating little vignettes that have been explored more deeply elsewhere: the survivalist father and his two daughters, the new parents, the college girls, the single mother.

There's little narrative drive and not much forward momentum: of course we don't expect a thrill-a-minute disaster scenario from this author but this book feels static - even (ha ha!) comatose?

Of course, K-TW's prose is cool and precise, and there are thoughtful moments throughout exploring the roles of sleep and dreaming. All the same, an odd little book: it somehow feels like its centre is missing. Worth a read but be aware of what you're getting.

The Dreamers

My thanks to Simon & Schuster for an ARC of this novel via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was attracted to this book by the reference in the blurb to Station Eleven and Never Let Me Go. In both cases, these are books I love and I have read all the novels these two authors have published. So, The Dreamers has a high bar to jump over!

I can see the comparison with Emily St. John Mandel’s book even if it is slightly forced. Both books deal with an outbreak of a virus. Station Eleven is far more complex as it skips backwards and forwards in time over the central, global event to gradually tell the story. The Dreamers is far more linear, straightforward and localised in structure. I can’t really see the connection with Ishiguro’s book.

A young girl stumbles in her dorm room late at night and falls asleep in her clothes. That’s perhaps not completely unusual, but the fact that she doesn’t wake up is. Then others start to fall asleep as the mystery illness spreads through the community. We follow the lives of several people as they navigate through this crisis. There is the doomsayer single parent with two daughters who has stockpiled against every eventuality except his own demise. There is the married couple with a new baby that they just want to sleep until suddenly that is the last thing they want. There is a young student with a hidden reason for wanting to help the victims. There is a psychiatric nurse trapped by being at the hospital when the quarantine starts and separated from her young daughter.

In fact, it felt to me that there were too many of these individual threads and I think it would have worked better with fewer lives to track and more story about each. The other consequence of so many story lines is that we run out of book before we get to explore what was actually going on in the minds of the individuals who contract the disease. Early on we learn that their brains are hyperactive when scanned, deep in a vivid dream state. But that topic is not really explored until a sudden rush towards the end and this leaves the book feeling slightly incomplete. It is, after all, called The Dreamers and it feels towards the end that a better title would be The Sleepers because the dreams don’t play much of a part.

There are interesting sections that link with ideas that the current Man Booker long list has been exploring: the outbreak is localised and it is not long before the conspiracy theorists get on to it and the hoax rumours begin to fly. This is another area that could have been developed further, I think.

Overall, this is a very readable book that starts to think about the difference between dreams and reality. This isn’t a new topic, but the story is well told. For me, it is frustrating that so long is spent on the outbreak and so little time is spent on its consequences or on the reaction of the broader community.

The Dreamers popped up on Net Galley and although I hadn’t heard much about it before, the blurb drew me in and I quickly requested a copy. The folks over there thankfully approved me in exchange for this honest review, and I dived right in.

The Dreamers follows a handful of characters in a small Californian college town a little way outside of LA. It starts with a college student, who her friends are unable to wake up. It spreads to her classmates on her dorm floor, her professors, their families, neighbours, anyone and everyone gets the Sleeping Sickness. Soon the whole town in subject to speculation about this disease, and the whole world is watching them. No one is allowed in, and no one is allowed out. But how does it end?

Here’s the official blurb from Goodreads:

In an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a freshman girl stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics who carry her away, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and then another, and panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. As the number of cases multiplies, classes are canceled, and stores begin to run out of supplies. A quarantine is established. The National Guard is summoned.

Mei, an outsider in the cliquish hierarchy of dorm life, finds herself thrust together with an eccentric, idealistic classmate. Two visiting professors try to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. A father succumbs to the illness, leaving his daughters to fend for themselves. And at the hospital, a new life grows within a college girl, unbeknownst to her—even as she sleeps. A psychiatrist, summoned from Los Angeles, attempts to make sense of the illness as it spreads through the town. Those infected are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, more than has ever been recorded. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?

From the very first sentence, I knew this book was going to be something special. The prose are so breathtaking, so fluid and mesmerizing, not only do they fully draw you into the story, but they keep you there, enchanted, until nothing else matters but this story. I absolutely adored the narrative, but also the point of view. The story focuses on certain characters, yes, from Mei and Matthew, to Sara and Libby and their father, Ben and Annie and Grace, but it’s almost as if the narrator is telling you about these people as an afterthought, a by product of the tale of the Sleeping Sickness. It’s not a particularly character driven book – there are too many that it focuses on to be able to do that in depth – but it’s also not distant from the characters you do encounter. You’re drawn into their lives, but it’s like you’re kept a distance somehow, watching through the windows. I don’t mean that to sound negative – I don’t have one negative thing to say about this book – and it didn’t wasn’t impersonal. That’s just how I felt. Carried along on a stream of consciousness, looking in from the outside, circling the town and hearing everyone’s stories together.

In a way, the story telling felt similar to Blindness by Jose Saramago – in fact there’s even a quote from Blindness at the beginning of the book – but it also could be likened to Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. A very different end of the world type book – much calmer, quiet. And while I class Station Eleven as one of my favourite books of all time, I couldn’t get through Blindness. It’s been half read on my kindle for over a year now and I can’t bring myself to go back to it. The writing style of The Dreamers is so much easier, more tranquil. It guides you through the story on the wisp of a cloud.

Everything about this book was just right – the pacing, the amount of backstory you got about characters, the length, even the chapter lengths. I have no complaints whatsoever. Whenever I wasn’t reading it, I was desperate to get back to reading it. But when I was reading it, I was hoping it would never. I almost want to read it again straight away, but I am definitely eager to get my hands on a copy of the authors debut novel The Age of Miracles.

Overall, 5 stars. And definitely an author to look out for.

This was one of those books i seemed to fall into straight away - I was completely transfixed by this concept having never read or seen anything like it before.
Individuals in this town fall into deep and uncompromising sleep seemingly indefinitely a la Sleeping beauty, in doing so they are subject to wild and vivid dreams that appear to be their reality.

The writing of this story is mesmerizing and gives a very dreamlike quality to this book that i was very much a fan of. Its fairly slow paced which unusually adds to the story so worth sticking with until the end.

Definitely worth a read.

A strange epidemic affecting the inhabitants of a small town in America. More and more people fall asleep and cannot be roused.

The pace is a lot slower than what you would expect for a dystopian/apocalyptic novel. The story itself has a quiet dreamlike quality to it, as if the reader is removed or isolated from the story. It fit well with the overall theme.

The story is told from a few perspectives:

Mei is the room mate of patient zero and is put under quarantine with her fellow dorm mates.

Sarah and Libby’s father is a doomsday prepper, with 50 gallons of water, food, ammunition and gas masks he is dying to use. He is ready for any eventuality except getting sick himself.

Their neighbours, with a new born baby is frantic to get away before they also succumb to this mysterious illness.

Catherine, an out of town psychiatric specialist tries to puzzle out this medical anomaly.

This was a great premise and I did not mind the slower pace however as the story mostly focused on the characters reactions to the situation rather than the sleeping phenomena, very little answers are given about the mysterious sickness or what the victims themselves experienced.

Because of this the story felt a little incomplete to me.

It could also be that I was not really in the mood for a slower paced book that contributed to my slight dissatisfaction.

The Dreamers is an oddly mesmerising book. A dark fairytale, where the residents of a college town fall prey to a dreaming enchantment like a modern Sleeping Beauty. Every dream is different. Some see the past, some a possible future. All seem as real as the world outside the dreamer.

In “Marginalia” E. A. Poe wrote:

“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.”

The concept of Walker's book, the dreaming aspect, is extremely interesting; our brains take in so much of our surroundings, so much information and experiences, while the perception remains wildly uniquem, it differs from one human being to another, thus, Walker's idea of a sleeping virus is fascinating because it can impact each individual differently. The writing flows well, the cast of characters is wide and the journey of the boundaries between reality and dreams easily categorises this book not only as dystopian but as an exploration of the unknown as well, with emotional extensions.