I made it 17 percent of the way into The Sleepwalkers before I decided to DNF. Admittedly, I was having trouble with the writing style, but there is an incident of animal violence that made me decide that I was done. The initial description of Patricia Highsmith meets The White Lotus had me intrigued, but, ultimately, this just isn't the book for me.

Thank you, NetGalley and Simon & Schuster, for my free digital copy for review.

The Sleepwalkers is a thrilling mystery presented in a unique format that blends epistolary, transcripts, and notes to weave a captivating narrative.

The extensive letters exchanged by the main characters, a couple honeymooning in Greece, delve into their deteriorating relationship and offer readers glimpses into their backgrounds. While the letters may at times meander, they ultimately converge to unveil a compelling twist and interlace elements of family drama and a traumatic past.

Despite being set in Greece, the author skillfully creates an atmospheric setting with a brewing storm on an isolated island that foreshadows unfolding events. The characters engage in dubious and illicit activities, adding layers to the story.

I admit, I’m not a fan of the format, but the story, the couple, and their relationship, as well as their pasts, piqued my interest. If you're looking for a distinctive read, and like to piece together non-linear plots.

The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas

I am a sucker for a good postmodernist novel, and Scarlett Thomas’ The Sleepwalkers is just that best sort of brain candy for readers like myself. I should have known from the Contents page alone that this was going to be a book that dropkicked to the curb the well-worn tropes of privileged tourists uncovering murder and mayhem in an exotic foreign locale. And while there are plenty of the trappings of an escapist beach read to enjoy here, there’s also so much more.

For starters, almost no one is innocent in these pages, as everyone, even the victims, are curiously complicit in making themselves the main characters of stories unnecessarily rich with pain. But this isn’t a book about victim blaming. This is a book about the complicated choices that come with agency. As the main character of the novel, an actress and playwright named Evelyn whose star has been on the wane, writes in a letter:

QUOTE
[Y]ou’re not the only one who has accused me of making things up. It’s always been the same kind of dirt that sticks to me: slightly crazy actress who doesn’t know what is real and what is fake; who imagines drama where there is no drama; who drives her husband away with her petty jealousy. The girl who kneels in puddles to give blow jobs to men she doesn’t even like, because she simply must be in a story, even if she has to be the femme fatale, or, worse, the victim.

But even that girl rarely goes so fucking mad as to believe in an entirely different version of the world.
END QUOTE

Evelyn, you see, has been on the honeymoon from hell. She’s trapped on a beautiful but remote Greek island as storms are rolling in, forced to stay in a strange hotel where the owner is awful to her while fawning over her newlywed husband Richard. To add insult to injury, Richard claims that Evelyn is overreacting and being, as a matter of fact, quite mean to beautiful young Isabella, who is surely only doing her best as their hostess.

As everyone seemingly conspires to tell Evelyn that she’s just imagining the worst of everything, a pair of producers descends on the Villa Rosa, wanting to hear the story of the Sleepwalkers, another married couple who’d stayed there a year ago and tragically drowned after walking out into the sea together. Isabella is eager to tell them all about it but Evelyn, who knows a thing or two about performance and narrative, immediately suspects that not all is quite as it seems here. The more she uncovers about the Villa Rosa and the people in its orbit, however, the greater the danger she finds herself in.

Told in the form of found documents collected to create an overarching narrative, this is a book that not only coolly eviscerates the fairy tales rich tourists tell themselves about their much less wealthy surroundings, but also grapples with the idea of who really owns a story and who should be allowed to tell it. In Ms Thomas’ capable hands, reality itself seems to distort around the idea of truth in beauty, as surprising champions and adversaries of the idea emerge over the course of the novel. Even Richard, despite being a master gaslighter when it suits him, proves himself firmly in his wife’s corner on at least one topic. Her last one-woman show had been brutally received, perhaps for its very honesty in not advancing an expected storyline:

QUOTE
And, OK, I know I’m not the greatest feminist in the world, but I was so angry on your behalf then. All those centuries of male artists being given the benefit of the doubt. <i>Lolita</i>, for heavens’ sake! My English master at school was still recommending it as a literary classic in 2009. [...] All of the complex, layered, disgusting – and frankly <i>great</i> – works of literature by men that have stood so proudly on bookshelves for centuries. When women were finally allowed into this world they were basically given about five minutes before they were told to shut up and behave and never write anything with nuance.
END QUOTE

Nuance is the key to this startling portrait of marriages and murders and pasts spliced together by secrets and shame. Ms Thomas’ writing is like a riptide: it was a struggle for me as a reader to do anything beyond lose myself in her narrative flow. I felt at times breathless, if not outright suffocated, by the near unbearable tension of what she puts her characters through. The few people who do try to make things better on the island soon find themselves similarly powerless in the face of forces entirely outside of their control. Survival in the moment becomes the guiding force for all of them, as it has been for humanity ever since we first crawled out of the ooze.

Yet the odd glimmers of hope at the end for an unnamed but divergent reality, so different from what we’ve experienced and believe, so alien to the story Evelyn has told herself and us in order to survive – oh, it is an interrogation into story as truth that is as clever and disorienting as the rest of this novel. Honestly, the last thing that I expected when I picked up this thriller was to find it as intellectually engaging as it is entertaining and compulsively readable. Pick it up for your escapist White Lotus thrills, but I dare you to come away from it feeling at all unchallenged about what great fiction can do.

Oh my god, what a ride this book was. The Sleepwalkers is compared to The White Lotus, the HBO TV series, and if you have watched it, you're going to love this book. It has exactly the same vibes as the series, which made it so unputdownable. Evelyn and Richard just got married and go to Greece to spend their honeymoon, and as a gift from Richard's mother, stay at the Villa Rosa located in one of the islands. There, they meet a handful of strange people including Isabella, the hotel's owner. The book is narrated in letter form, narrated from both Evelyn and Richard. It never stopped getting weirder. My jaw literally dropped a couple times. It was twisted and sexy and outraging, all at the same time. I know I'll be thinking about it for a while. Get on it!!!

The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas is another novel set on a Greek island. (a popular spot for 2024 fiction)

"Evelyn and Richard are on their honeymoon at the Villa Rosa on a remote Greek island. Even after the revelations at the wedding, Evie decided to still go. She is worried about their enigmatic host, Isabella. She and Richard stumble into a secret on the island and wonder if they'll survive."

This is a slow moving story. There's a lot going on but Thomas gets to it slowly (even in a relatively short book) Richard comes from wealth and power and is not very likable. Evie has her own issues and she is not either. There's really not any likable characters here - mostly because of bad decisions and secrets. Parts are hard to follow, but when the pieces finally fit together (and you find out the secret revealed at the wedding) it makes sense.

The ending is ambiguous - intentionally I think - and the reader is left with some questions.

The decriptions are perfect - I felt like I was in the hotel and walking the streets with the characters.

Good pick if you're looking for a slow, meandering read.

A honeymoon takes a tragic turn on a reclusive hotel in the Greek Islands. Tension rise as a young couple, appropriately mismatched, become ensnarled in the resorts trap. The characters are ALL unlikable including the honeymooners. The atmospheric setting divine. The storytelling told through various mediums - letters, notes and the couples POV.

Overall enthralling read!

Thank you, Simon & Schuster

The White Lotus compairson sold me and I am happy to admit that it was spot on! Not quite what I was expecting but I think there's a lot to like about this and I enjoyed my time reading it.

I thought this wound up being pretty cool. This has a creative storytelling style that helped move me through the story, even the style of writing causing tension for me at times.

Evelyn and Richard are newlyweds that seem quite oddly matched. They are staying on a Greek island for their honeymoon. However, things get weird quickly, and as the tension rises, I learned about a whole other twist that kept me on my toes till the very end. And, the ending is strange. But, for such an interesting book, I wouldn't expect any less!

Out April 9, 2024!

Thank you, Netgalley and Publisher, for this Arc!

Nothing about this book worked for me.

The entire story is told via letters, which would have been interesting had the content not been so bizarre. The first 43% of the book is one letter, from Evelyn to her husband Richard. She spends time reciting their history together, telling him things he clearly already knows since he experienced them alongside her. I kept wondering why she would be spending all that time writing every little detail of their experiences together, arguments, etc.

Then we switched to a letter from Richard to Evelyn, but the tone and language didn’t change much at all.

The mood of all this was melodrama and misery. Not one single person was the slightest bit likable.

The plot was all over the place, hitting on topics such as gaslighting, trauma, abuse, mental health issues, class disparity, and on and on. But mostly this was about two newlyweds who clearly didn’t even like each other.

I just didn’t care what happened to anyone in this story.

DNF at 49%

Kind of an uncomfortable story. Tense but also like you don’t know what’s real. It’s kind of dark and everyone is kind of unlikeable.

It did keep me invested but I’m a little confused by the ending. It felt unfinished and I’m not sure if it was supposed to be deliberately vague or if I missed something.

I read some of the reviews of this book to decide if I wanted to read it, and in spite of some that were not positive, I did read it. I think I liked it? It is told in a sort-of disjointed way, but I still found it easy enough to keep track of most of what was happening. I found it compelling enough to finish in one sitting. It’s pretty disturbing, so saying I enjoyed it isn’t quite right, but I thought it was well done. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I love a surprise, and The Sleepwalkers is bursting with them! So many twists and turns and shady characters. I'm still processing days later, but I loved the subtle and overt allusions to theater, film, and literary works/conventions throughout. It brought a fun layer to the experience of parsing out the truth of the couple's shared history and hidden sins, like working through encoded messages. A fun, yet deliciously disturbing read.

THE SLEEPWALKERS
Scarlett Thomas

They walked calmly and deeply into the water without hesitation looking for their lost love. Only to come up short, empty, full of regrets, and the Mediterranean Sea.

They were known as THE SLEEPWALKERS

Evelyn and Richard are on their honeymoon. Evelyn is surprised they made it there. With no help from her beautiful and meddling mother-in-law or her rich and handsome father-in-law.

They are staying in a small boutique resort called the Villa Rosa on an Island in Greece. Both Evelyn and Richard are happy to be there, looking for endless days of eating drinking, and soaking in The Grecian sun.

But the moment they arrive Evelyn can tell having a relaxing time on this honeymoon is going to require a lot of effort.

Will their honeymoon give their relationship new life, or will it be the death of their marriage?

Only time and THE SLEEPWALKERS by Scarlett Thomas will tell.

THE SLEEPWALKERS had all the usual suspects. And just because you’re used to having them around doesn’t make them guests. The novel progressed in a reliable yet lackluster way. I don’t think anything here is going to surprise you.

I admit to seeing parallels between THE WHITE LOTUS and THE SLEEPWALKERS. However, they are dissimilar in vibes and enjoyment. It reminded me of Freida McFadden’s THE HOUSEMAID. I think you will like this one if you are a fan of hers.

Thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for the advanced copy!

THE SLEEPWALKERS…⭐⭐

This book is trying too hard to be too many things and turns out to be nothing. It had potential but seemed to veer off in too many directions to do any one direction justice.

You ever finish a book and wonder wtf you just read? And not in a good way? That’s me with this one. As soon as I started it I knew this would either be a love or hate it situation for me but I was interested enough that I wanted to see it all the way through and hoped it would be worth it and it just wasn’t for me at all. It’s very unique and told in letters but the first one didn’t end until forty three percent and good lord that just seemed excessive. The beginning tells you there’s ruined documents involved but as you read sentences are cut off or the voice changes abruptly and I know that was a specific choice but it wasn’t a good choice. It made it difficult to piece the story together and I think I’m a smart reader but this was confusing. The ending was such a letdown and left way too many questions, a decent premise but the execution was awful for me.

This was a unique book. It’s told in the form of letters the husband and wife write to each other or other people. They are on their honeymoon on a small Greek island. Some of the letters cut off randomly and it made me think I was missing something but I figured out that’s how it is supposed to be. I found it to be a bit confusing. But the story and format is different and interesting with some twists added in. I was really interested in seeing where the characters would end up.

This was such a unique and different story. It was told mainly in letters one from the wife and one from the husband. They are recapping what went wrong in their relationship and baring the truth that they know and have hidden from their significant other. They are on their honeymoon and a storm is approaching the island. Storming many ways- storm in the weather but also a. Storm brewing in their marriage. I think this book has a lot of deep correlations that seem to tie them to the legend of the sleepwalkers and other past events in their life. It is quite a different story- I was defiantly captivated and read it one day as I really wanted to know what was going on! I’m still not fully sure I understand all the connections as the story is open ended for your interpretation. Many thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the digital review copy of this novel. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

This book is really, really dark. Please check content warnings before reading!

The Sleepwalkers tells the story of Evelyn and Richard, an ill-suited couple on their honeymoon in Greece. He’s stuffy and dismissive and very judgmental and sexist. So, uh, not a real winner. Evelyn is also pretty unlikeable. Their honeymoon is very strange, as they’re originally joined by friends, and then spend the second week together at a different hotel chosen by Richard’s mom, during storm season.

The structure of this novel is strange too. In several instances, sentences cut off. I thought I had a damaged Kindle file, but I think it was perhaps a function of the story. I found it confusing. The “letters” in the story are also unrealistically long — so while the form of the novel is interesting and sometimes clever, I also felt taken out of the story by the form a lot. I wish we got more clarity in the end as well.

I think Patricia Highamith meets White Lotus is an accurate description for this book!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Know that this is told through letters- a long one from Evelyn to her husband Richard, one from Richard to Evelyn, and a collection of others- but it all hangs together in a surprising way. Evelyn and Richard are newly weds who don't seem to like one another very much. They're on their honeymoon at a hotel on a Greek island where an American couple walked into the sea a year ago. What really happened? That's one of the mysteries that will slowly unfold in this slim but full novel. No spoilers from me. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. An unusual and good read for fans of literary fiction.

Thanks to Netgalley and Simon and Schuster for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Evelyn and Richard are on their honeymoon on a remote Greek Island near Turkey. They are staying at a hotel arranged by his mother and the proprietor is a very strange lady. Evelyn and Richard clearly don't like each other and the trip is not going well, add to that, an autumn storm is coming, and those can get ugly.

I didn't like this book. It was not only confusing, but boring. It is written as a collection of letters, but the first one in particular goes on for probably a third of the book. I think the author tried to do something unique and different, which I applaud, but it just didn't work for me. The letters abruptly ended in the middle of a sentence. I often didn't know who was writing the letter. I really lost interest, and I can't even say I really know or care how it ended. I was too confused and over it to worry about comprehending it. I definitely considered DNF'ing multiple times. I am shocked I stuck with it. Sorry, it just didn't work for me.