Sleepwalking

Description

A disquieting and moving novel exploring the taboo of extramarital sex in pregnancy. Susan finds her year-old marriage to Alistair less than ideal. Just as she contemplates leaving him, she discovers that she is pregnant with his child. As she grapples with this news, she learns that her loathed father has killed himself. Left confused and bereft by these developments and haunted by visions of a little boy, she meets a seductive young painter and, despite knowing it could lead to crisis, begins an affair with him in her eighth month of pregnancy.Told with an eye for startling details and an unerring sense for psychological truth, this harrowing, passionate, obsessively compelling literary debut captures the reality of a young woman's inner landscape while spinning a tale that will hypnotise readers to its last satisfying pages.

Julie Myerson is the author of Home- The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House and nine novels, including the best-selling Something Might Happen, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. In the words of the Observer, she 'has a talent for making the unthinkable readable. The results are riveting.'

Sleepwalking is exceptionally good... Myerson has made the most pointed comments on parenthood since Philip Larkin * Sunday Telegraph * Julie Myerson...tackles murky themes with grace and clarity. Her prose is nimble and springy. Her short scenes, flicking between past and present, flash before us like a deck of cards shuffled by a top-class conjurer... Myerson is the genuine article * Independent * A measured evocation of bereavement and childhood trauma * The Sunday Times * An impressive literary debut... funny and moving * Guardian * An emotional, delicate, lucid and extremely likeable debut * Elle *