Sleep
By Honor Jones
Riverhead, May 13, 2025
From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised.
Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously: the one she was born into, and the one she has made.
Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood slip away.
Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents’ bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She’s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.
Warm and generous, unflinchingly human, and ultimately joyful and empowering, Sleep is about the cycles of motherhood and childhood, the cost of secrets and the burden of love, and what’s on the other side of silence: the world, rich in possibility.
Praise for Sleep
“Sleep is a haunting and beautiful novel about a desperate attempt to live in the present despite the tidal pull of the past. Mother, brother, and ex-husband all have strong opinions about what happened to Margaret and who she needs to be now, but she refuses to live inside their definitions. It’s a quiet brand of heroism that I found to be incredibly moving.”
–Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto and Tom Lake
“Propulsive and funny and heartbreaking.” –J. Courtney Sullivan, author of The Cliffs
“With elegant language and a profound insight, Honor Jones takes the gossamer of painful childhood memory and swept-away family secrets and transforms them into the sturdy scaffold of Margaret. Heartbreaking, gobsmacking, sexy, and full of humor… Jones gathers the whispers of stories too often swallowed and transforms the tale of a divorcée’s self-discovery into something utterly fresh, original, and exhilarating.”
–Xochitl Gonzalez, author of Olga Dies Dreaming and Anita de Monte Laughs Last
About the Author
Honor Jones is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and a former editor at The New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn with her three children.
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