I wasn't the biggest fan of Behind Her Eyes so I was actually kinda avoiding this author as "probably not for me". But, a book buddy of mine assured me that I would love this book so I decided to give her another go. And, although I wasn't as blown away as my buddy, it was a good solid read nonetheless.
Emma has left her tragic past behind and reinvented herself with a high-powered legal career, supported by her wonderful stay-at-home husband who looks after their two children. A far cry from the foster homes and mad mother of her past. She has worked hard to put it all behind her but, as her 40th birthday approaches, the same age as her mother was when she turned into a monster, Emma fears the same will happen to her. And it all becomes a case of is it going to happen or is she making it happen cos she thinks it will... As her life then starts to disintegrate, her insomnia ramps up, and the reappearance of her sister and dying mother into her life, threatens to undo all that hard work...
This is a bit of a slow burner, and also a bit repetitive in places. But I guess both those things fit with the narrative insofar as they reflect the madness that the main character appears to be spiralling into. I do have to say that it all did get a bit much on occasion and I was willing the author to get on with it, but that's more a reflection of my (lack of) patience than all the author's fault.
She did do it again with the ending which I did not see coming and which also made me have to sit back and do a bit of thinking to get my head round things. Which I am not sure that I did fully. That said, it wasn't as blatant and mind-bending as BHE, and this time I was kinda half expecting something, so it wasn't as "Out Of Left Field" to me. It also wasn't the be-all and end-all like I found BHE.
All in all, this resurrects the author in my eyes and I will probably go back and see what I have missed out on, as well as being open to what she cooks up for next time. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

Thanks to NetGalley, Sarah Pinborough and HarperCollinsUK for the ARC of Insomnia.

I was a big fan of another of Sarah's titles Behind Her Eyes and because that required a bit of defying belief, I was fully expecting that this book was going to be a little different from your average thriller.

Emma is a successful divorce lawyer and Mum of two children, when on the approach to her 40th Birthday, she suddenly stops sleeping and is convinced she is going mad,. As a child, Emily's mother suffered with her mental health and sanity and tried to suffocate her older sister with a pillow on her 40th birthday. In the last conversation they'd had, she told Emma it would happen to her to0 and suddenly with her birthday just days away, she starts experiencing severe insomnia, blackouts and starts acting erratically with no memory of doing it.

The book is a slow burn that builds up quickly and all the way through you find yourself wondering whether someone is out to get Emma or if she genuinely is losing her mind. I found this lack of clarity really enjoyable despite none of the characters being particularly likeable.

The twist is (as I expected) quite far fetched, but if you go in with an open mind it makes a unique and captivating read, that ironically will keep you awake all night (reading!).

3.5/5

This is one of those books that you are either going to like or not ... for me, I liked it. It's a proper mind-messing read where you don't know what's real and what's imagined.

Emma, the main character, is not what I would call a particularly likeable one; mind you, not many of the characters in this book are if I'm honest but that doesn't really matter to me that much and, if anything, it makes it even more intriguing as you don't know where the story is going to go.

It does start off pretty slowly while the scene is being set but during this time, there is the slow drip, drip, drip of information and the creation of tension, suspense and misdirection that all comes together in the end.

This is a complex and original story which uses a touch of the "unknown"; it's dark, unnerving and unsettling and I would recommend to anyone who enjoys something a bit different in their psychological thrillers.

Many thanks to HarperCollins UK, HarperFiction and NetGalley for my copy in return for an honest, unbiased and unedited review.

A bit slow to start and at times I found it hard to like the main character. As it progressed I got hooked , dark and disturbing , I had to know the ending .
Bit of a strange twist but enjoyable .

I'm still undecided about how much I enjoyed this. It takes risks within its genre but it struggled to hold my attention at times. I'll keep an eye out for her next book but I may not race to read it. (Copy received from Netgalley in return for an honest review).

This is a really clever psychological thriller.
Emma is enjoying life at work and with her family but her fortieth Birthday is just around the corner.
She is worried that she will go mad, as her Mum did on her fortieth Birthday.
We find out gradually what Emma’s Mum did and find out she’s been in a secure unit since Emma was five years old.
Emma’s sister calls her out of the blue and tells her to come to the hospital immediately. She thinks her sister is ill or injured but when she gets there she realises it’s her Mum who is in there.
Emma does not want to see her due to her childhood memories but her sister thinks she should put it behind her.
Events then take a turn for the worse with Emma not being able to sleep and her family questioning her actions.
Emma’s life is soon in turmoil but she’s determined to find out who has it in for her.
This is a gripping thriller.
Thanks to Harper Collins UK and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

Insomnia Sarah pinborough
***** five stars

Just before emma’s 40th birthday emma starts having trouble sleeping just like her mother did before her 40th but her mum ended up going mad when emma was five and her sister pheobe was seven and ended up in a secure unit is the same thing happening to emma her mum said she had the family bad blood like her and her aunt it happens to all the second born children in the family
I really enjoyed this book from start to finish I couldn’t put it down it was so gripping and it kept me guessing the whole time this is the first book I have read by Sarah pinborough and I can’t wait to read more of her books

I do love the way Sarah Pinborough writes. It is pretty fast paced and always entertaining. Every time you think you know what’s going on, Pinborough will throw a curve ball at you. So it is with Insomnia.

Emma Averall is a successful divorce lawyer and mother of two. Her husband is a stay at home dad. Emma is nearing her 40th birthday and she is so not looking forward to it. Because Emma’s mother went mad on her 40yhj birthday and she and her sister Phoebe experienced some very dark times when that happened. It’s a darkness Emma does not want to dwell on, but it keeps coming back to haunt her and as the day draws nearer, her sleep patterns become more and more erratic.

This, in turn, makes her less likely to be a reliable narrator and the reader’s job is to understand what’s going on insider her head. As her insomnia grips her, so her relations understandably become more strained. Her sleeplessness is affecting her work; making her snappy with her husband and impacting on her children.

Emma’s not revealed her dark childhood to her husband, preferring to lock her experience away and she has only said that her mother is dead; a lie she has inveigled her sister into supporting.

But as the big day approaches, Emma begins to see signs of her mother’s madness in her own behaviour and it is preying on her mind and keeping her awake. Is Emma paranoid or is she in fact losing her mind?

Sarah Pinborough builds suspense really well and that feeling if intense pressure building in Emma’s mind comes through beautifully in her writing as Emma’s scratchiness becomes more and more worrying and her relationships with pretty much everyone start to deteriorate until she is second guessing herself at every turn.

This is terrific writing that draws you in and at the same time has you looking at every single character and wondering about them, too. What Pinborough does really well is to build up a really plausible scenario and give it layers and depth while creating characters each of whom seems to carry the potential for dodgy doings.

Emma is an interesting character. It is easy not to sympathise with her, because she seems to be the one who has it all. A successful career woman with a lovely house and a husband who cares for the kids and was happy to make the bargain to be the stay at home dad to enable them to enjoy the lifestyle they now have. But this kind of success comes at a price and Emma is finding it higher than she bargained for. It also makes her less of a sympathetic character and so the reader does not root for her quite as much as we might, which is incredibly interesting food for thought!

Insomnia is a really tense and unsettling read that sends little shivers down your spine and makes you question everything and everyone. It is one of those reads you fly through, wanting to understand what’s going on; thinking you know what’s behind it, only to be wrong footed at every turn.

Verdict: A really enjoyable, tense and chilling propulsive read.

I love that with Sarah Pinborough you just never know what you're going to get. I was massively intrigued by the premise of this novel. We follow Emma who has a great life - husband, kids, successful law career - when she suddenly stops being able to sleep and becomes easily disorientated and confused, experiencing hallucinations and memory blackouts.

Her mother experienced the same issues once she reached the same age, and insisted Emma was doomed to fall into madness. What follows is an intense story as we follow Emma as she tries to figure out what's happening and why her past is coming back to haunt her.

The book has a great premise and I recommend it to fans of Pinborough. I enjoyed the book but couldn't rate it higher as the pacing was quite slow, and I wasn't satisfied by the ending. Also Emma's voice gets very tedious and wish different character perspectives were introduced from the beginning to break it up.

Having enjoyed several short stories by Sarah Pinborough, I was keen to see how she would sustain the suspense through a novel. I wasn’t disappointed.
Emma is a successful lawyer with a loving family. However, that family have little idea about her own childhood and when that childhood starts coming through in horrible waking nightmares, Emma starts to struggle to hold her perfect life together. Will she hit 40 and end up fulfilling the ghastly destiny foretold by her Mother?
The unravelling of the main character is artfully revealed and the major twist adds interest in the latter parts of the book when you might be wondering exactly where the plot is going.

Another brilliant write friend m this talented author. I like her characters and the twists anx hoe every book is different. Particularly liked feisty Emma in this one!

I’d like to thank HarperCollins UK, HarperFiction and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read ‘Insomnia’ written by Sarah Pinborough in exchange for my honest and unbiased review.

Emma is a high-flying solicitor with a stay-at-home husband Robert and two children Chloe and Will. Her mother started losing her mind on her 40th birthday and told Emma that she would too. Now, as Emma’s counting down the days to her birthday she’s suffering from insomnia and doing strange and inexplicable actions, just as her mother did. Everyone suffers from insomnia sometime in their life but if, as Emma believes, it’s a precursor to madness it’s enough to make you question your own actions.

‘Insomnia’ is a dark and chilling psychological thriller of a woman’s past, present and future. The story counts down from twelve days before Emma’s 40th birthday and as the tension builds her mental stability begins to disintegrate. She starts blaming people for actions that she can’t remember carrying out until she doesn’t know who she can trust, if anyone. The plot is well thought-out, the character descriptions perfectly documented, and Emma’s italicised thoughts and memories together with intrigue, suspense and twists and turns add to what is a creepy story with a surprising and unexpected ending.

Loved the sound of this from the blurb (and turning 40 myself soon!)
But omg did it not deliver.
The build up was so slow and repetitive, I felt it could have been about a third shorter. None of the characters were likeable and I found it hard to believe Emma was capable of anything much less being a high flying lawyer and mum. She was just helpless and feeble from the outset and for some reason put up with so much terrible behaviour from everyone, trying to be her daughter's mate instead of her mum, letting her husband treat her like rubbish (he added nothing to the story)
and her behaviour with Caroline was just cringe from the moment they met.
I'm so glad to have made it to the end of the book even though the ending was entirely unbelievable and a bit ridiculous.
Not for me, my thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for my eARC in return for my honest review.

A tense plot where that awful feeling of ongoing insomnia is used to psychological effect.

A little slow to get started but soon picked up. You may need to suspend your belief for the ending, but I feel it works.

After just one night of being unable to sleep you can feel really out of sorts but what if you can’t sleep for days on end and you find yourself acting really strangely. Add into this the fact that your mum went insane just before her 40th birthday and that very same birthday for you is only days away….

What started out as a book about a woman seeming to be on the verge of a breakdown soon developed into a really gripping thriller that I just couldn’t put down. Slightly terrifying but really exciting.

I haven't read much of Sarah Pinborough's work, but I loved Behind Her Eyes, so when I saw this on Netgalley, I jumped at the chance.
I got into it pretty quickly, but soon started to realise it was going to be a slow burn. I won't say I was getting bored, but I felt like I was reading and reading and not getting very far, the first 60% of the book setting the scene for the final 40%.
By then, I couldn't wait to pick it up and find out which way it was going to go, who I should trust, and what that final twist was going to be.
And I have to say, when I got there 🤯 👏 bloody brilliant
That ending definitely saved the book for me.
I debated for quite a while on my rating, and I did give it 4⭐️ but after thinking on it a while, I knew that I just didn't love it so had to lower my rating to a 3.5⭐️
Overall, I did enjoy it, it had all the right things, but it perhaps could have been slightly shorter.

Thank you to @netgalley and @harpercollinsuk for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review

I loved this book-Emma is struggling to sleep. Is this the same curse that befell her mother with disastrous consequences? This was a real psychological thriller that was absolutely gripping. Would love to see this made in to a film.

This story is focused on the twelve days leading up to Emma Averell’s fortieth birthday.
Emma is a successful family solicitor, married(not so successfully) with two children.
She becomes obsessed with her 40th as that was when her mother tried to kill Emma’s sister Phoebe.
Tense build up of Emma’s mental struggles and increasing insomnia throughout book was good, if a little slow. I found Emma a difficult character to like or understand but as book progressed I really enjoyed it right up until the weird ending which kind of spoilt it for me and brought my score down from 4.5 to 3.5 stars ⭐️.
Thanks to Netgalley for allowing me to read this book in return for a fair review.

Emma, a successful divorce lawyer, is approaching her fortieth birthday and she thinks she is going mad, as her mother had done on her fortieth birthday. Increasingly delusional, a slave to repetitive actions and with a verbal tic of quoting a meaningless string of numbers, her mother had tried to smother Emma’s older sister, Phoebe, aged nine. Although only five at the time, Emma had escaped from the understairs cupboard where her mother had put her earlier and managed to stop the attempted murder; at which point her mother had collapsed into a catatonic state from which she never recovered, and had been placed in a psychiatric facility. Emma has always told people her mother died of unspecified causes; even her husband Robert and children Chloe, 17, and Will, 5, have been told this. But now, a few days before Emma’s fortieth, her mother has badly injured herself and has been transferred to a hospital where she subsequently dies. Emma’s secret is out. Emma finds herself starting to re-enact her mother’s actions and reciting the number sequence like a mantra. Is there a family curse? Is the second child doomed to go mad, as her mother and sister had both insisted? Will she be driven to attack one of her children? As her family and her career start to disintegrate, Emma strives to make sense of her behaviour and overcome the incipient madness.
This is a very powerful psychological thriller, told almost entirely from Emma’s perspective. The writing is very strong and the characters well drawn. There are some twists of what we might call a conventional kind – genre expectations – but the mystery is eventually resolved via a premise which is very unexpected (unless you have read other books by Sarah Pinborough and know how her unconventional mind operates). I can see some readers being annoyed by this, but those with the tolerance for a challenge will appreciate yet another of surprises.
I would like to thank NetGalley, the publishers and the author for providing me with a draft proof copy for the purpose of this review.

Emma Averall has it all, a high flying legal career, two beautiful children and her amazing stay at home husband, but her childhood was a different story because when she was five, Emma and her older sister Phoebe were taken into care due to an incident that occurred when their mother turned forty and Emma is scared that history is going to repeat itself, she is going to be forty in a few days time and she's already experiencing some of the symptoms her mother had before she was sectioned. Emma is desperately hoping her mother's predictions are wrong, she just needs to get to her birthday without any incidents of her own.

This story begins with the countdown to Emma's fortieth birthday, twelve days to determine whether she is turning into her mother, which is a very scary thought under the circumstances, Emma has lived with the trauma all her life, not even telling her family what happened, that's a huge secret to keep all this time! This one is a bit of a slow burner to start with, repetitive in places, but this didn't affect my enjoyment of the book and I was keen to find out exactly what was going to happen to Emma by the time her birthday arrived. Pinborough has this way of drawing the reader in, like a moth to a flame, making you question everything the main characters did. I didn't particularly like any of them, though I did feel sorry for Emma, as I too am currently experiencing insomnia and it's hard work coping with that and still trying to lead a normal life. It's a well thought out premise, which had me changing my mind frequently as to what was going on, was Emma losing her mind or was there a third party involved here? Insomnia is a definite page turner and one you don't want to miss.

I'd like to thank HarperCollins UK and Netgalley for the auto approval, I will post my review on Goodreads now and Amazon on publication day.