The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping
SAMANTHA HARVEY
(JONATHAN CAPE, 192 PP, £12.99)
Tablet bookshop price £11.69 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Most of us, by the time we reach middle age, are familiar with sleeplessness. An occasional bad sleeper, I once wrote a jolly book about the absurd, tragicomic carnival of anxieties that passes through one’s head on a long, bad night. I must say, though, my insomnia was and is trivial compared with that of Samantha Harvey, novelist and tutor on the MA creative writing course at Bath Spa University.

In this short, bleak chronicle of a year of sleeplessness, that reads like a dream sequence (except that, sadly for her, she’s wide awake), she tells us that she sometimes doesn’t sleep between Sunday and Friday. Not a wink. Even reading this made me feel dizzy and headachy; living it was unbearable torment. “There’s a terror when a basic animal need isn’t met,” she writes. “At first you fear death, then a worse thing happens. You fear life.”