NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep in this mesmerizing novel from the bestselling author of The Age of Miracles. “Stunning.”—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven • “A startling, beautiful portrait of a community in peril.”—Entertainment Weekly NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY … Weekly
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Glamour • Real Simple • Good Housekeeping
One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster.
Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?
Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life—if only we are awakened to them.
Praise for The Dreamers
“Walker’s roving fictive eye by turns probes characters’ innermost feelings and zooms out to coolly parse topics like reality versus delusion. . . . [It has] the perfect ambiguous frame for a tense and layered plot.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“[Walker’s] gripping, provocative novel should come with a warning: may cause insomnia.”—People (Book of the Week)
“Powerful and moving . . . written with symphonic sweep.”—The New York Times Book Review
“2019’s first must-read novel . . . Alternately terrifying and moving . . . The Dreamers is overflowing with humanity.”—Jezebel
“This is an exquisite work of intimacy. Walker’s sentences are smooth, emotionally arresting—of a true, ethereal beauty. . . . This book achieves [a] dazzling, aching humanity.”—Entertainment Weekly
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The Dreamers is harrowing, riveting, profoundly moving, and beautifully written. In a word, this book is stunning.
Beautifully written. I would definitely recommend this to fans of Station Eleven!
Hmmm… So… I went into this book expecting something completely different. I had so many questions, so much curiosity to know certain things.
But as I finished the novel, I realized that I was going about it the wrong way. There are things to take away from the story and those things aren’t necessarily what I wanted to take away.
In short, this book can be likened to life. You don’t get what you want but rather what you need.
All I can say is that I came out a better reader and a better thinker once I finished this extraordinary and profound story. And for that, this gets all my love.
In a voice as expansive and beautifully controlled as the voice of The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker once again creates a wholly new world out of a familiar landscape. In a drought-stricken California, college girls grow drowsy, and then they begin to fall asleep. And then: the dreams.
How do we protect ourselves and the ones we love not only from inexplicable outside forces, but also from our own worst instincts? Walker made me a fan with The Age of Miracles. With The Dreamers, she’s gained a super-fan: everyone should read this book.
A modern Midsummer Night’s Dream… In this wonderful novel, Walker paints a haunting canvas exploring time, memory, consciousness, and youth.
Reading this book during a pandemic was definitely an interesting experience. I will say, the authors interpretation of what would happen in society given a highly infectious virus felt pretty spot on. I was prepared for this to be more character driven than plot driven, but I still do wish we had been given more plot. After spending so long with these characters, I still didn’t feel fully attached to them. I think we will forever compare books like this to Station Eleven, and by that comparison it fell a bit short for me.
TheDreamers
Karen Thompson Walker
“Hysteria-that’s the real disease of this era.”
**Summary**
In the small college town of Santa Lora, California, a party girl passes out in her dorm. Her roommate, Mei, can’t wake her. This girl is the first. More students on the same floor are next. And it continues out as things always do. Several story lines spin throughout: the teens Mei and Matthew, the young girls Sara and Libby with their unhinged father, the young couple, Ben and Annie, and baby Grace, the biology professor, Nathaniel, and his invalid partner, Henry, the psychiatrist, Catherine, quarantined in the hospital, a sleeping student, Rebecca, plus numerous doctors, nurses, neighbors. Lives crossing and uncrossing. All are touched by the sleep in some way. This town is trapped as the nation watches. What are these people dreaming? According to doctors, it’s something never seen before. What will happen if they wake up? If they don’t?
**My Thoughts**
This narrative feels hazy and pleasant, like I might drift off reading. Each story line brings it’s own urgency, tragedies and triumphs. Who will sleep next? There is tension in the air. Do you help others or save yourself? The world is terrible and bleak. Most sleepers keep sleeping. Some wake speaking premonitions they believe are true. Someone wakes convinced every dream was the future, “the feeling that these dreams are somehow glimpses of days yet to come”. But, these events already happened in the past. Nothing can change this person’s mind. Still more swear they dreamed the future in past events. Why? Where were these people? What’s real? Are we a dream? This is a story about the big questions and the small moments.
“Time: that’s what the dream is really about.”
The defining moment for me is a character waking seeming to have lived a long life in sleep, but waking, it vanished. The loss of that life is extremely profound. I felt it so deeply it surprised me. The loss became a living thing. I had no breath. I wanted this character to sleep again in the life lost. This book knocked me off my feet and I loved it! So unique and haunting.
Thanks to NetGalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review.
More than 5 stars!
I knew before the end of the first page that this book would be something special. The first sentence alone if simple and perfect. “At first, they blame the air.” It’s so simple and yet tells the reader this is going to be an incredible and heartbreaking journey.
The story centers around a fictional college town in California. College students begin falling asleep and do not wake up. The sleeping sickness soon spreads throughout the town leading to panic, chaos and quarantine. Walker does an amazing job with the narration, switching between different townspeople seamlessly and skillfully developing each character and what is at stake for each of them as the criss escalates.
This book is about so much—dreams, consciousness, time, love and loss. And so much more. The writing is nuanced descriptive and completely enthralling. I literally couldn’t put this one down. This will definitely be one of my favorites of the year, if not of all time.
This truly original tale is that of a small college town struck by a mysterious, haunting illness. One by one, the community members succumb to a deep sleep and are lost to the dream world. Part mystical, part mystery, this story asks the bigger question. How far would you go to help another and at exactly what cost?
The Dreamers is one of the strangest science fiction novels I’ve read in decades, if it can even be called science fiction, and it’s also one of the most beautifully written and oddly addictive novels I’ve read in years–so odd, in fact, that I was awake for hours trying to work out a way to review it. For the quality of the prose alone, it gets 4.5 stars from this reader, but as far as the plot and characters, it gets 4 stars overall.
There is something really strange going on in the remote southern California college town of Santa Lora, and it all starts when one of the students in the dorm, Kara, falls asleep and doesn’t wake up, nor are any of her fellow students able to wake her, nor are the doctors at the hospital able to wake her from what they classify as a deep state of REM sleep. All they can do is keep her hydrated and fed via a feeding tube. Since it’s the beginning of the school year, the other students, including her roommate, Mei, don’t know each other well, and so their detached feelings about this odd occurrence aren’t unusual, but soon other students on the 10th floor of that dorm are also affected by the same affliction–is it a plague? A virus? A mass hallucination? No one seems to know, and soon the students on other floors are evacuated, and the 10th floor is put on quarantine, and still students on that floor are falling into that dream state, as do people who’ve come into contact with anyone in the dorm. The dreamy prose adds a sense of unreality to the situation, and is reminiscent of novels like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, What Dreams May Come, Arrival, and Outbreak, among others, the multi-character narration is both strangely compelling and at the same time mysterious and dreamlike.
Whatever this dream-state contagion is, it spreads rapidly through the air, and soon the entire town is quarantined by the military, and the college–it’s grounds and buildings all turned into a sick ward as more and more people, including those on the medical teams also fall prey to this illness. The many narrators, including Mei, an Asian student, who was the roommate of the first girl to be affected, teams up with Matthew, one of the oddest boys from the 10th floor, as they try to help, to protect themselves, and to understand what’s happening. Two young female sisters, daughters of a survivalist father who falls ill, are also featured, as are Ben and Annie, new parents, and we follow Ben trying to care for his infant daughter when Annie soon succumbs to this sleeping sickness. One of the strangest cases is a growing fetus inside the womb of one of the female dreamers viewed with an unusual sense of detachment. All are experiencing something for which there seems to be no cure and no explanation, adding to the mystery, suspense, and the dreamlike quality of the experience, both for the characters and the reader.
The pace is rather slow-moving at the outset, allowing readers to get to know some of the many characters involved, and as more and more people succumb, the focus hones in on Mei and Matthew, and Matthew is a student of philosophy, bringing up such philosophers as disparate as Descartes, Freud and Jung, all in his attempt to make sense of it all. Are the dreamers real, or are those who’ve not succumbed merely characters in their dreams? What is the true nature of reality? Are we all living in our own dream state?
As a few of the dreamers eventually begin to awaken on their own, those who do seem to feel a disconnect with what others view as the present. Some report feeling as if they’ve seen the future, and continue to feel out of touch with the present. Others believe they’ve been sent to the past in their dreams, some believe that their dreams were prophetic, and some can’t shake off the effects of their dreams, but if you’re waiting for definitive answers to the many questions that arise in this novel, especially those about the nature of what we all experience as reality and the linear nature of time, the answers to these questions are ones you’ll have to interpret for yourself. Prepare to do some heavy thinking, and encourage your friends and family members to read this novel, and I can assure you there will be many conversations about the nature of time and reality in your future. I was thoroughly entranced by the elegant prose in this addictive novel, and, if you too are drawn to questions and conversations about the nature of time and reality, I think you’ll be equally entranced and equally addicted to this brilliantly written novel.
I voluntarily read an advance reader copy of this novel. The opinions expressed are my own.
i wanted to love this. i wanted so badly to love it. “southern california gothic” was blaring through my head in a hot neon buzz while i read the first parts of it. what a cool concept! what a stellar backdrop! its bedrock was a love letter to where i grew up, and it was set up beautifully. there’s a ton of rich prose that could just melt in your mouth, and i spent plenty of time savoring that, turning all these jump-out bits over against the insides of my cheeks.
but oh, my god, emotionally, this book goes nowhere, and i can’t tell you how much that disappoints me. it hit a plateau and, boy, did it stay there right through the end. my heart shot up at the beginning with the massive potential of this book, but it fell into a total flatline. after a point, reading this was like trying to pay attention to a story during a round of morphine. i got the words, i was able to parse what was going on, but it was so lukewarm and fizzled out like a stubborn party that tries to keep going in the early AM when everyone is already asleep. the beer’s already stale; the snores are coming from some vague corner of the room. that’s all this book had for me.
sorry i’ve written so much. i just was convinced i’d love this book and i’m almost floored that i couldn’t. the plot threads went places, they all ended up somewhere, but it was done so quietly that it felt like none of it mattered.
Through days and nights, sleeping or awake this small town in Southern California becomes a place caught in a suspected spreading virus. Each person’s story has hope yet for some of them hope is in a dream and others it is caught up in the actual world. Why are some felled by sleep and others not? A beautiful novel about finding one’s self in both the waking world and a dream world. I found myself caught up in the visions Walker created for me. Several times I needed to put the book down and think about what this book says about people, their hopes and their dreams.
I really wanted to like this book more! The premise was interesting…people begin falling asleep, leaving behind their loved ones and friends to wonder and struggle as their town is shut down from the outside world. While sleeping, their brains show increased activity, which can only be due to dreaming. But what are they dreaming about…the past they’ve lived or the future still to come? The story tended to drag a little in the middle. The best part was towards the end, when one of the characters falls asleep and you get a glimpse into what she is experiencing.
The author is a great storyteller, and I’m looking forward to reading her first book.
I’m not much of a Sci Fi/Dystopian fan but after listening to Karen Thompson Walkers coming-of- age/dystopian book The Age of Miracles years ago, I was swayed over to the genre. The Dreamers however pushed me past simply liking the genre to truly loving it. It made me realize that the heart of the genre dies this, it sets the characters in extraordinary circumstances and tests human endurance. Sounds heavy, but what made me love this story was the myriad of characters and how their lives and relationships are changed by the unique disease plaguing a small mountain town in California.
The story opens with introverted college student Mei as she observes co-eds and quickly introduces us to the campus, where the virus broke out and the first victim is hospitalized. We then begin to cycle through chapters giving us the background of Santa Lora and then a new focus on some central characters impacted by the outbreak. First Sara and Libby, the girls in the yellow house with the dooms-day father. My heart strings were tugged and I felt a certain kinship with them. I so wanted to step in and protect them from whatever may come. Next we meet a specialist called in to investigate the outbreak, Catherine. She leaves her life and her daughter as she’s charged with uncovering what’s happening and finding the root cause.
Then we are introduced to various professors at the college; young parents Ben and Annie, already changed by the entrance into the world of their daughter, and biology professor Nathaniel, missing his own daughter and his partner, who is impacted in a way far beyond anything seen as this sleep/ dream state envelopes the lives of every citizen in Santa Lora.
Through it all Walker examines what dreams mean, various philosophies and how the act of dreaming unites and divides. What I loved was the way the story is told, a unique “news story” prose and I do love the idea of parallel universes, the questioning of what if our waking conscious is just a dream and are past and present becoming indistinguishable.
In a sign of praise and yet a knock against the book is that I would love to see more of what becomes of a few of the characters. I found myself completely absorbed in this story and I highly recommend this 5 Star read!
What a book! I read The Dreamers in a dream of sorts myself, entirely transported into Karen Thompson Walker’s world of mysterious tragedy and infinite, if unexpected, compassion. This is a profound novel, and a deeply moving one. How she takes a terrifying situation and reveals it as a thing of beauty, a lesson in the human spirit, is a mystery to me, but she does exactly that, and fortunate readers will celebrate this extraordinary book.
Frighteningly powerful, beautiful, and uncanny, The Dreamers is a love story and also a horror story — a symphonic achievement, alternating intimate moments with a panoramic capture of a crisis in progress.
It is much harder for me to write a review of a book that I did not like rather than one I loved. I do not usually read science fiction/fantasy or whatever genre this would be assigned to but the reviews were so good for this novel I decided to give it a try.
The premise is not a new one. There have been many books written and movies made of a virus or some alien illness infecting humans and making them behave in one way or another. In this case whatever this is, makes humans fall into a deep sleep. Doctors have them hooked up for hydration and they show high levels of brain activity, but what does it all mean? It starts in the dorm of a college town in Santa Lora, California, a very idyllic setting. The book initially had me hooked, I kept reading to see where it was all going to lead.
At first it is just the college students being infected and they are not allowed to leave the floor of their dorm. But quarantine does not work as many of the students on the floor continue to fall into the sleeping sickness. They are then moved to a gym and not allowed to leave, still more fall ill. It was thought that perhaps the ventilation system was to blame for the sickness but that has been ruled out.
There are many elderly people in a nursing home who fall ill to the sickness. Now the doctors and nurses that are tending them are sick, it seems no one is safe.
I would like to say that this book has strong characters, but I did not find that to be the case. We get to know a young couple, both professors, who have an infant just a few weeks old. We get to know a bit about their life before they moved here and how they are now working as a team, groggy from lack of sleep, as all parents of newborns are, but now never leaving their baby alone, fearful for the first signs that she will not wake up.
Mei is a college freshman who really wanted to be in an Arts program but her mother insisted on this college instead. She is shy and has trouble making friends. She could have been made more interesting if we knew more about her background. For her this forced kinship with others from her dorm floor almost seems like a good thing.
There are a lot of loose threads in this book. There was mention several times that the lake level was lower than normal. Did this have something to do with the sickness? Nothing is ever resolved.
Thrown into this mix it is discovered that a college student, Rebecca, has become pregnant and she is one of the last to awaken, nearly a year later. In the meantime she has given birth to a girl, but when she wakes she can only remember a strange “dream” where she is the mother of a son and is already past middle age. Is this a characteristic of this illness??? Who knows, we don’t hear of anyone else with this type of dream????
There was a group of people who had been staying in a motel but run into the forest to escape quarantine. Was there something wrong with the motel? They all soon fall sick.
There were so many individual occurrences that never seemed to lead to a resolution or cure. There is quite a large cast of characters but I didn’t find them to be well described.
Then there is a wildfire in the mountains and again for unexplained reasons, many people wake up from their dreamlike sleep while others perish. Can this be the cure????
This was one of the most frustrating reads I’ve had in a long time. I felt no strong connection to any of the characters. There were so many ideas or hints at things that may be causing the sickness but in the end there is no resolution and the sleeping sickness as it was being called never spread beyond this small town.
In the end, even after several days to think about it I was still left with the question of “what did I just read”?
I received an ARC of this novel from the publisher through Edelweiss.
ynopsis: In an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a freshman girl stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics who carry her away, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and then another, and panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. As the number of cases multiplies, classes are canceled, and stores begin to run out of supplies. A quarantine is established. The National Guard is summoned.
Mei, an outsider in the cliquish hierarchy of dorm life, finds herself thrust together with an eccentric, idealistic classmate. Two visiting professors try to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. A father succumbs to the illness, leaving his daughters to fend for themselves. And at the hospital, a new life grows within a college girl, unbeknownst to her—even as she sleeps. A psychiatrist, summoned from Los Angeles, attempts to make sense of the illness as it spreads through the town. Those infected are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, more than has ever been recorded. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?
Written in gorgeous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking novel that startles and provokes, about the possibilities contained within a human life—in our waking days and, perhaps even more, in our dreams.
Thank You Good Reads and Random House for this crazy read.
I have to say I read this book straight through, no stopping. Yes it is that good. I mean imagine going to sleep and not waking up. I mean not like the death go to sleep way but dreaming.
This story starts in Santa Lora, California at a college. Mei tries to wake up her roommate who she finds still asleep when she returns later that day. When Mei tries to wake her up well she doesn’t. Soon it’s happening all over town and soon the town is in quarantined and no one can get in or out. Parents are trying to get through to check on their kids. I loved the characters, Annie and Ben, Mei and Matt, etc.
What I love about this book is you don’t know what is going to happen. The Author set it up that you didn’t know when someone would not wake or how it was going to end. This book will stay with me a long time.
I highly recommend this book. It is available January 2019.