Sleep: A Novel

by Honor Jones

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Haunting, heartbreaking, but ultimately hopeful, Sleep explores the nuances of parenthood and childhood through one remarkable character.

NAMED ONE OF OPRAH DAILY'S "MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025"
ONE OF PEOPLE'S "MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025"
ONE OF ELLE'S "BEST BOOKS OF SPRING 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.

"Nuanced and powerful."—The Washington Post
“Incredibly moving." – Ann Patchett
“Propulsive and funny and heartbreaking.” —J. Courtney Sullivan
“Heartbreaking, sexy, and full of humor . . . exhilarating.” —Xochitl Gonzalez

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593851982
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/13/2025
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Honor Jones is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and previously at The New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn with her three children.

Editorial Reviews

03/10/2025

Jones delves into the shame and secrets that drove a woman apart from her mother in this sharp debut. When Margaret was 10, she began to fear bedtime because of uncomfortable touches from her 13-year-old brother, Neal. Making matters worse, she was afraid to tell their elegant and commanding mother, Elizabeth, who was often cruel to her. Now, 25 years later, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Margaret co-parents her two daughters, ages eight and four, with her ex-husband in Brooklyn. She tries to keep her daughters safe by gently asking them to reveal their worries to her, but they are either tight-lipped or carefree. Meanwhile, she keeps her own painful childhood at arm’s length, even as she commissions stories of sexual assault and harassment for the magazine she edits. When her older daughter, Jo, asks for a pool party at Elizabeth’s house for her birthday, Margaret readies herself to return to the home she’s long avoided. Jones dials up the family tension in quotidian scenes and, through laughter and heartache, lays bare the dysfunction Margaret’s fought to escape. Readers will find much to admire in this intelligent story of trauma bubbling to the surface. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Sleep

"Hypnotic... Jones crafts a nuanced and powerful exploration of a woman’s struggle to come to terms with her past… a masterpiece of carefully crafted perspective and tone…Margaret’s plight may feel tragic, but it’s transformed by sheer force of will — and Jones’s tempered prose — into something heroic, even hopeful."—The Washington Post

“Jones’s prose is spare but effervescent, her evocation of childhood is pitch-perfect, and she handles delicate subject matters in adroit and surprising ways.” —Elle

"A haunting and beautiful novel about a desperate attempt to live in the present despite the tidal pull of the past…Incredibly moving." —Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake

“SLEEP marks the arrival of an astonishing new voice in the world of literary fiction. Honor Jones writes with honesty and courage about life’s complications and contradictions. This novel is propulsive and funny and heartbreaking.” —J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of The Cliffs

“Heartbreaking, sexy, and full of humor . . . With elegant language and profound insight, Honor Jones transforms a story of family secrets into something utterly fresh, original, and exhilarating.” —Xochitl Gonzalez, New York Times bestselling author of Anita De Monte Laughs Last

“A magnetic, breathtaking novel. I could not put it down and will be recommending it to everyone I know.”— Cherie Jones, author of How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

“Beautiful, bruising, incisive and heartfelt. Sleep takes a moving, maddening, funny and searing look at childhood, family and marriage. I adored it.” — Chris Whitaker, New York Times bestselling ­author of All the Colors of the Dark

2025-02-15
The lasting effects of childhood trauma.

We meet Margaret in the summer before fifth grade, hiding under a blackberry bush in a game of flashlight tag with her best friend, Biddy, and their respective older brothers. Margaret wins, but when the kids rejoin their parents, her mother, Elizabeth, snarls, “You’re filthy,” and strips the mortified girl to her underwear in front of everyone. Elizabeth’s unpredictable mood swings are bad enough, but the nocturnal visits from her brother Neal that summer are worse: He fingers Margaret’s body when he thinks she’s asleep, and she’s too afraid of upsetting Elizabeth—who tried to commit suicide after her husband had an affair—to tell anyone. Unsurprisingly, Margaret grows up to be a confused, conflicted woman. She’s devoted to her daughters, Helen and Jo, but divorced for reasons she can’t wholly articulate from their father, Ezra, a kind man who never understood the depths of her malaise. Debut novelist Jones nails the details of a dysfunctional family dynamic: Subjected to Elizabeth’s blatantly unfair criticisms, Margaret perpetually “thought but did not say” why they were unjustified; when Elizabeth is searching for a word and Margaret supplies it, her mother says, “No that’s not it,” and supplies an incorrect one; and Neal grows up from a molester into a smug, right-wing creep. Despite its emotional accuracy, however, the novel seems oddly distanced. This may accurately reflect Margaret’s inability to express feelings or recall past events unacceptable to her family, but it doesn’t make for compelling fiction. Descriptions of her sexual relationship with a new boyfriend (she likes to be dominated in a way that flirts with masochism) are similarly authentic but alienating. On the positive side are Jones’ nuanced depictions of Margaret’s relationship with her daughters and of her lifelong friendship with Biddy.

Smoothly written and sharply observed, but curiously unengaging.

Kirkus Reviews