This was such a unique book and really fun to read! I’m a lover of books that use a mixed media formats - the use of letters, audio transcripts and notes made this book more interesting than a generic thriller. With that being said, because of the style I sometimes felt a little lost and it seemed like I had to put in extra work to actually figure out what was going on.
There were some really good twists and it was pretty atmospheric. I loved learning about the island and all the different people on it including the main characters. The ending was a bit on the unbelievable side but personally that worked for me as it fitted with the style of this book.
I would recommend this to people who enjoy thrillers but want something that is written and feels different!

The Sleepwalkers is a novel told in letters about a couple on what seems to be a doomed honeymoon on a Greek island. Evelyn and Richard have been gifted a stay at Villa Rosa, but a storm is coming, the hotel's owner seems to be particularly interested in Richard, and there's a story of a couple who drowned during their stay at the hotel recently, and things seem to be falling apart, but it isn't just the present that will come back to haunt them.

I'm conflicted about how I feel about The Sleepwalkers. The fragmented epistolary style is playfully frustrating and most of the major plotlines in the book don't get resolved because of it, making it more of a literary puzzle at times, with contrived reasons that bits are missing, and that's pretty fun. The book took a long time to get into, particularly as the first two parts are long letters from Evelyn and Richard respectively that are very rambling. Evelyn's part is purposefully set up to position her, probably the main character, as an unreliable narrator, but also one that you're questioning if she's actually right and nobody believes her. Richard's offers more of a set up for their backstory and the terrible revelation at their wedding, and that element of the plot seems to be trying hard to be shocking (I guess it's tricky to think of shocking twists when most have been done before).

For the rest of the book, the various narratives converge, with what is happening on the island becoming important, and some other playfully dark fragments filling in the fairly obvious gaps from Evelyn and Richard's past. Strangely, the sleepwalkers part (the couple who drowned previously) barely plays any part and never really goes anywhere, despite a lot of mentions of it early on, and I imagine people who are more into the mystery/thriller side than the scandal/unreliable narrators in letters side will find this disappointing. The narrative around the hotel and Isabella is more fleshed out, though a meta-narrative about whether it would make a good film adaptation does hit the nail on the head about how it is confusing and perhaps makes the actual dark side (I won't reveal what this is) underplayed.

Nevertheless, The Sleepwalkers is tense and harsh book about terrible people telling stories, and once you get past the slow opening there's plenty going on and a decent pace. There's some weird comments in it that might be trying to make a point (a jab at Lolita like it is internet discourse about how to interpret it, a weird conversation about why someone had been "cancelled"), but otherwise it feels pretty timeless, with a darkly funny streak that plays with what the audience might want from a coherent story.

The Sleepwalkers follows a newly married couple who’ve been booked into a hotel on a small Greek Island as a wedding present, finding themselves the only guests at the end of the season. When they check in, the Villa Rosa’s owner greets Richard warmly, almost flirtatiously, but gives Evie the cold shoulder. A revelation made at their wedding has made them both feel their relationship is doomed, made worse by the discovery that another couple drowned recently, one attempting to save the other who slept walked into the sea. When two other guests turn up, interested in turning the sleepwalkers’ story into a movie, things take a decidedly odd turn.
I’m wary of saying too much about this gripping novel which plays with the thriller genre, leaving its readers handing on by their fingertips. Thomas presents her story as a series of documents – letters, transcripts, notebook pages – some written by Evie, some by Richard, others by hotel guests – several fragmented. Evie is a particularly pleasing unreliable narrator and it’s her letters that make up the bulk of the story, small bombshells let off as she tries to piece what happened to the sleepwalkers and why, while telling us her own story. I thoroughly enjoyed this clever smartly constructed novel, its tension kept taut right up to the end.