Book Summary and Reviews of Sleep by Honor Jones

Sleep by Honor Jones

Sleep

A Novel

by Honor Jones

  • Publishes:
  • May 13, 2025, 272 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"[A] sharp debut...Readers will find much to admire in this intelligent story of trauma bubbling to the surface." —Publishers Weekly

"Smoothly written and sharply observed, but curiously unengaging." —Kirkus Reviews

This information about Sleep was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Honor Jones

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

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