Sleepless by Louise Mumford is a Debut novel that is a psychological thriller mixed with a bit of dystopian fiction and sci-fi too. Again, another debut that is raising the bar. You would never realise this was a first novel it IS that good!
Thea is an insomniac; she hasn’t slept more than three hours a night for years.
So when an ad for a sleep trial that promises to change her life pops up on her phone, Thea knows this is her last chance at finding any kind of normal life. She enters the trial and soon enough she finds she is sleeping really well and for longer than she has for ten years at least. The weird thing is that they won't allow her to leave her bedroom without permission, she has no phone signal and her shoes and everything she owns are all locked away.The fact that there are armed guards at her door isn't exactly normal.
This Big Brother style of this sleep trial shows as they not only monitor their test subjects but changing the sleep patterns of them too without anyone knowing at first. Thea’s initial thoughts of the trial starts to change as she begins to realise things aren't quite as they should be. She begins to feel paraniod and scared, she attempts to get to the bottom of it all even though she does not know who to trust and why this is happening.
Thea really is torn in two, does she escape or try to get to the bottom of this scary thing that is taking place?
This is a unique plot and I really enjoyed myself delving into a bit of sci-fi and dystopia that ran alongside the thrilling story.
I was swept along in Thea's search for the truth. A very good, entertaining read. Thanks to Rachel's Random Resources and Louise Mumford for the copy of the book for my review today.

An original and gripping read.

The character was likeable and easy to relate to, the description of insomnia is tangible and accurate.

Highly recommend.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Found it quite moving.....a bit shocking in parts that kept me reading.
Stayed up most of the night reading as didnt want to put it down then i didnt want it to finish.
Loved it

An insomniac at the end of her tether. A sleep clinic that promises solutions. For so many people, this is relatable, right? Now, suspend reality and sleep less as you dive into this (for the most part) page-turner.

Blending science fiction, dystopian, and thriller genres, Sleepless crosses boundaries and marks itself out as something quite different. It's dark, at times suspenseful and compelling.

It's not perfect though. Whilst huge sections had me turning pages, there were some that I felt could have been omitted without loss to the story. Characterisation of the protagonist was, on the whole, excellent but this is a plot-driven, rather than a character-driven novel. I would have liked a little more development of some of the characters and I think that this change might have lifted the book in places where the plot felt a little unnecessary.

I love a good thriller but for me, this didn't cut it in the genre but it did give an opening to more sci-fi and dystopian works which I probably wouldn't set out to chose. As a result, the whole comes recommended.

With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

Thea doesn’t sleeep. Initially, we aren’t given much background as to why but it is clear from the dramatic opening that it is having a significant impact on her life.

She is invited to a futuristic, almost science fiction in style, sleep clinic for 6 weeks to see if they can work with her to get her to have longer and better quality sleep (she is averaging around 1 hour a night). Will the sleep clinic be all it claims or be? Or will it cause more problems than it solves?

There is a lot of things I really enjoyed about this book. It is a hybrid book – a little bit of science fiction, a little bit dystopian, and quite a lot gruesome thriller! This makes it totally original and unlike most things I have ever read before.

Due to this, it is also totally creepy and dark. It was just about the right level of dark for me, and the author handled the plot well in order to get that balance right.

It was also completely addictive. I found myself reading it whenever I got a chance, and sometimes missing out on sleep myself to reach the end of a particularly dramatic and climactic section!

This is a fast paced, gripping and original debut by an author who is definitely one to watch!

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I started Sleepless, but this wild, action packed sci-fi type thriller definitely took me by surprise!


This book was mad, honestly, I couldn't put it down! What starts as this strange, creepy sleep trial, held on a tiny island with no phone signal, becomes this wild, fast paced game of cat and mouse! It's hard to keep up at times and feels like the characters spend most of their time running around the island.

I liked Thea, the main character and also her mother Vivian who has her own chapters. I also enjoyed the ending, I can't say anymore than that but I like how it was left.

This is by no means a perfect book and I don't think everyone will enjoy it. It involves a bit of suspension of belief and the writing isn't perfect. But I found it an enjoyable read that certainly had me gripped til the final pages! My advice, download a kindle sample if you can and give it a go!

What an adventure! A non-stop action fest from start to finish, Sleepless is a really intriguing premise: what if scientists could hack sleep to make humans highly evolved? And what if those experiments went wrong? Really interesting book!

Oh my, this was an absolute stunner. You know when you just pick up a book and be sucked into the story, only to surface groggy eyed and feeling like you’ve escaped reality for a few hours? This was exactly what this book did for me.

I find sleep a fascinating subject. I wouldn’t say I suffer from insomnia as such but I do spend my fair share of hours chasing the illusive shut eye usually when I wake in the wee small hours of the morning. It can feel like you’re the only person awake in the world. Louise perfectly captures the loneliness, the sense of isolation and the tiredness that takes overs your body from lack of sleep.

Thea’s insomnia has driven her to despair. Wanting to claim back some form of a life she embarks on a sleep trial, handing over the most intimate part of her, her mind. The trial promises to cure her sleep difficulties and even help her become a better version of herself. But what if there is a more sinister reason behind the trial? Once you allow someone to tamper with the mind is there anything they won’t be able to do, anything they won’t be able to control.

It’s not long before Thea feels that the trial is asking just a little too much of her and asks to leave. But leaving isn’t quite that simple, especially when someone has their sites on controlling your sleep, even controlling your mind , and so doesn’t want you to go.

This is a such a clever novel. It’s incredibly unnerving but completely absorbing. I didn’t know who to trust right up to the very end and felt every emotion that Thea was feeling. The anguish, the despair and the fear. Yet she’s made of stronger stuff than she thinks and She firmly fights back, quite literally fighting for both her mind and her life.

This would without doubt make a stunning film. It has so many high adrenaline and ‘will she make it’ moments that push you on, turning page after page. Our fear of technology is embraced within the pages of this novel. Or perhaps it’s the fear of those who control the technology. For me it almost felt like a modern day Frankenstein, and what a monster they had created this time!

Many thanks to the lovely people at HQ Stories for inviting me to take part in the blog tour. It was a fantastic read and I wonder if there is the opening for a sequel within the final pages. Oh, I do hope so.

Thea hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in years. At best, she can manage 2-3 hours a night, but most night’s it’s not even that much. When she sees an advertisement for a sleep trial, she figures it can’t hurt to try it. Except it does; it hurts her in ways she never, ever could’ve imagined. I was super excited to read this book and thoroughly enjoyed the beginning chapters. But when it turned into chase and kill scenes chapter after chapter, I just got bored of it. I think the premise was really good, but it reminded me of those car chase movies that a lot of guys love, just without the cars. Disappointing for sure.

NOTE: Special thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to read this in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and HQ Digital for this copy of Sleepless by Louise Mumford.

So, I'm an insomniac. Have been for my whole life pretty much so I could definitely relate to the main character of Sleepless, Thea, and her desperate search for a solution to her sleepless nights and miserable, tired days. When Thea is recruited to an experimental sleep study she makes the decision that any insomniac would make, she signs up. What could go wrong? Well, you have to read Sleepless to find an answer to that question!

I was really looking forward to Sleepless based on the premise and I ended up mostly enjoying it. There were parts that I felt could have been omitted with no real change to the plot and characters that existed for such a short time that their existence in the book felt pointless. Mostly though, it was a good, solid thriller. I would definitely recommend it to all of the thriller fans out there!

4.5 Stars

An assured, sophisticated and chilling debut, Louise Mumford’s aptly named Sleepless is a mesmerizing thriller you will happily forego sleep for.

A good night’s sleep has been eluding insomniac Thea for years. She cannot remember a time where she slept more than three hours straight and her erratic slumber patterns are effecting every single aspect of her life. She cannot concentrate or focus on anything and she has long given up on ever having any kind of normal life. Thea is at her wits’ end and doesn’t know how long she can go on like this, so when an advert inadvertently pops up on her phone about a sleep trial that promises to change her life, Thea signs up without hesitation. This seems like the answer to all of her prayers. Having waited for an opportunity like this for so long, Thea cannot wait to get started. But does she know what she has signed up for? Is this going to be the start of a brand-new life? Or a lethal experiment that is going to destroy everything?

Initially, all seems well. For the first time in over a decade, Thea is having a restful and invigorating night’s sleep and slowly but surely, she begins to feel like a new woman She is so thrilled with her transformation that she doesn’t notice the disturbing nature of this experiment. There is no phone signal, she needs to ask permission to leave her bedroom and all her personal possessions have been taken away. Is this experiment really about helping Thea sleep better? Or is there something far more sinister going on here than meets the eye?

As Thea’s unease begins to grow with each passing day, she quickly realises that this experiment doesn’t want to help her, it wants to control her. Will Thea manage to get out of this alive? Or is it already far too late?

A brilliantly plotted, wonderfully intense and deliciously spine-tingling thriller you won’t be able to put down, Louise Mumford’s Sleepless is a masterclass in tension and suspense. With relentless twists and turns, shocking revelations and jaw dropping horrors, Sleepless is a nail-biting and nerve-twisting chiller that will have you jumping out of your skin, switching all the lights on and bolting your doors and windows.

Louise Mumford certainly knows how to ramp up the menace and danger in a claustrophobic debut thriller that will send your heart rate soaring through the roof: Sleepless.

When I caught sight of Sleepless, I knew this book was for me. Sleep is my frenemy. On Facebook, our relationship status would be “It’s complicated”. I immediately thought the book had been written for me: sleep at its heart, categorized as a thriller, and an intriguing blurb. This was a no-brainer.

Did Sleepless deliver?

It did more than that!

The striking opening felt both like a slow-motion movie and a powerful and quick bounce on a wall. Thea has never been able to sleep properly. She’s lucky if she gets an hour of sleep per night. Or day. We’ve all experienced the lack of sleep, the state of feeling under water, as if every little task was too much. The bright light, the loud sounds, the headache. Thea lives with all of this every day. She’s found a way to cope, or at least, she thought she had, until an accident forces her to look for help on uncharted territories.

Sleep, and more generally how our brain works, is fascinating and Louise Mumford totally nailed both the account of what a lack of sleep can do to us and how to explain it in normal people’s way as well as in a more scientific way. No, there are no intricate talks with medical blabla in Sleepless. Instead, the author took a big lense and focused it on a bunch of people who couldn’t close their eyes for different reasons. Then she gave them a solution. And the rest is… Sleepless!

Thea decides to trust an app and become part of a trial that pledges to ‘mend’ those bad sleeping patterns. She ends up away from her mother, robbed of everything she knows and thrown on an island with strangers suffering from the same kind of issues. Would you make the same choice? Well, after reading this book, my answer is no. I’m gonna befriend insomnia and welcome it when it visits!!! Louise Mumford anchored all of her characters in reality, kept their eyes open, and drew their nightmares in. Isn’t this scary??

Well, there are more than one kind of nightmares in this book. With a bunch of scientists gathering data about you, then trying their magic on you, you can ask yourself who ever thought about doing this. An insomniac? A genius? Yes, there is work to be done to help people, and there is so much we don’t know about the brain, but that’s where it hurts. We don’t know, and we won’t, if we don’t poke and try and get answers. But for that you need guinea pigs. And we all know how science develops. Lots of wrong answers before you get the right one.

Sleepless is like sleep, it is made of different phases: Thea, our main character and the driving force behind the book, the scientific research, the mystery surrounding the company and the app, and sleep itself.

I read this book jumping from one scene to the other, just like in a dream; with only a gold string keeping everything attached. ‘Thea can’t sleep’ became ‘Thea embarks on a crazy thing’, then I got to meet new characters, like Rosie, and each of them added colors to the black and white journey of the sleep-deprived. Questions popped up. The genius in this book is that those questions don’t all revolve around sleep. What drives people to use others? What about conspiracies and big companies? Do you believe in ghosts? Can you trust what you see? Can you trust yourself? Sleepless took me on different paths with outstanding landscapes and reminded me you don’t need to sleep for the monsters and nightmares to get to you.

Now, if I could, I’d like to let Louise Mumford know that I need MORE. Call it Restless, and give us more thrills, and answers! Pretty please! The ending left me breathless, almost as if I’d just woken up in the middle of the night, hands tightened around my sheet. Was it real? Was it all? Is this the end? What do I do now?

I recommend Sleepless to all of us battling with sleep, but also to everyone who loves an intricate thriller which majestically knits a tight and suffocating plot about how the suffering of some can be used for… the greater good… until it goes wrong.

This book is insane and freaky, it’s good and addictive, and right at all the right places!

A strangely addictive book about insomnia. As a sufferer of this myself I was intrigued on how it was perceived in the book. When the opportunity of a cure comes along Thea seizes the chance to participate knowing she might never get another chance to sleep normally. Unfortunately it soon becomes clear that there is a price to pay for this.

Thea has been suffering from insomnia for years. She gets between one - two hours a night. When she has a near car accident, she decides it's time to get some help with her sleeping. On seeing an advert for a new sleep app from Morpheus, she Hope's this could be the answer to her sleep problems. But when something seems too good to be true....

At first all goes well at the slerp clinic until Thea sees something or someone in the monastery. That's when things turn a little nasty. The characters are well developed but they're not all likeable. Some parts of the story were predictable while others were far fetched. I also felt we were left with a lot of unanswered questions and the ending was a bit rushed.

I would like to thank #NetGalley, #HQ and the author #LouiseMumford for my ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I missed the label of sci/fi and fantasy on this book so I was glad to see it was more within my genres - techno and psychological thriller.

What's worse than participating in a sketchy medical trial? Participating in a sketchy medical trial, on an island, in the winter, with no escape. I get shivers just thinking about it!

Sleepless definitely does draw comparisons to Black Mirror, the high-tech Twilight Zone. Poor Thea just wants to sleep and enters a trial where she must commit to stay in the trial once she starts. She qualifies for by the skin of her teeth and she is so desperate for the chance to participate she quits her job. Says goodbye to her one and only friend (her mother) and goes off to the island. She didn't bargain for the lack of cell service (and chocolate!), the lectures or the exercise routine, but she does start to get a little bit of sleep.

And that's when bad things start to happen.

Mumford keeps you on the edge of suspense trying to guess how things will end for Thea. And the whole time, her mom, Vivian is convinced Thea has joined a cult. Vivian's character was colorful, but her character was a bit jarring because she almost read like a character in a cozy mystery. But her parts were small(ish) so it didn't take away from the overall impact of the book.

Great new entry in the mystery/sci fi field!

Thanks to NetGalley and HQDigital for an advance reader's copy for review.

This book started very well, I like the character of Thea, I thought the plot of her not being able to sleep and joining a trial to help her was really good, however this is where it stopped for me, this book was more fantasy Sci Fi than crime thriller. I do enjoy Sci Fi however was looking for a good psychological thriller about a sleep trial. Unfortunately it started to get a little strange for my liking and I gave up half way through.

Sadly this book wasn’t for me. I felt that it became more and more unbelievable as it progressed. I wasn’t expecting the technological / almost sci-if aspect to the story and it wasn’t something that I brought into.
I am sure others may enjoy it but it just wasn’t to my taste. That is to take nothing away from the writing though as it wasn’t bad at all.

I really enjoyed this. This follows the main character of Thea, who I found really likeable. Thea has had difficulty with her sleep for years, and very rarely sleeps more than a couple of hours a night. She sees an ad for a sleep trial that promises to change her life and she thinks she has nothing to lose so she signs up.

Thea is taken off to a remote island for the sleep study, with some other participants. At first she thinks nothing of it, and is amazed by how well she is sleeping, however soon things seem to be a little strange and she realises the sleep trial is not what it seems, and has a more sinister purpose.

This was a psychological thriller with plenty of mystery. The writing and the island setting also makes you feel a bit claustrophobic, as if you are experiencing the island and it’s confined spaces along with Thea. I thought this was very well written and could picture the desolate landscape very well. The side characters were also a welcome addition, and I liked how Thea’s relationship with them developed, her mum is also hilarious. This was full of little twists and turns and kept me interested throughout. I thought the ending seemed a little rushed and would have liked to have seen this to be a bit more detailed. I would recommend this and will be looking out for more by this author.

Thea doesn't sleep. She rarely sleeps more than an hour or so every day. She is tired, her brain is tired, she even starts having minor hallucinations because her brain is so sleep deprived. Thea sees an ad for a sleep study, she jumps in with both feet thinking that maybe this time she will get the sleep she needs.

Thea quits her job and tells her mother that she is going to an island for the sleep study. She is a bit disturbed that she has to leave her cellphone behind, but she wants to sleep and the proctors discourage distractions that will keep you from sleeping. At first the sleep study is about good health, exercise and sunshine that will allow your body to relearn how to sleep, but Thea senses there is a sinister presence on an island that isn't supposed to be inhabited.

The study head offers Thea $20,000 pounds to take a different sleep study. They believe they can train Thea to not sleep at all - the sleep elite. Thea is hesitant and can't imagine never sleeping, always awake, never turning her brain off.

When her close friend on the island is brutally attack, Thea knows there is something wrong with the study and and the people who are running it. But will she be too late to leave the study with her life?

There is some violence in this book that may be scary for some readers. There are few good people who are willing to help Thea and there are few people she can trust. I really liked the book and thought it was well written and fast paced.

This sounded really interesting, but sadly I found I wasn't enjoying it very much. Although there were certainly sections where I was tense and wanted to find out what would happen next, there were also plenty of sections where nothing happened for so long that, ironically, I almost fell asleep.

As in a lot of this type of book, the main character is never sure who to trust or who's telling the truth, which meant that I, the reader, never really knew what was going on either. And, unless I missed something huge, there was no resolution at the end; a large plot thread was just left there, unfinished.

I liked some of the characters; not wanting to give anything away, my favourites included an angry B&B manager and a frizzy haired chocoholic. But they couldn't save this story for me, which is a shame, because the idea of it was great, and fantastically creepy. There's also a really great dream sequence which, unlike most invented dream sequences, really felt like a dream. These things just didn't weigh up against the rest.

Not for me, this one.