This was a “what did I just read” kind of book. For the first nearly half of the book, the main character is writing a letter to her husband, recalling their honeymoon up to that point. Then it switches to the husband writing a letter to his wife. Then some other letters and a transcript. It has no chapters, and with that long letter at the beginning, kind of felt like a never-ending run-on sentence. But I will say that if you stick around for that, the husband’s letter makes things get interesting. And then the ending… well I won’t say more here to keep it spoiler-free, but I’m not sure how I feel about it. Part of me likes it, part of me is disappointed. This is a book I wouldn’t necessarily recommend, but want people to read so we can discuss it.

Have you ever finished a book and thought “what in the H*LL just happened!?” Well, that was my exact sentiment with this one. Was it a ghost story, a time loop, a mystery play that isn’t really even happening? I honestly still don’t know…

This has to be one of the most uniquely written, sinister and seductive stories I have ever read - Gothic drama mixed with titillating thrills and an edgy surrealism that’s rare to see. There was so much I didn’t see coming. The twists and turns were so disorienting that I was never headed in the right direction at all. That’s something I LOVE in any thriller.

The story is centered around one couples disastrous honeymoon on a Greek island, told through letters, notes, photographs, and barely legible transcripts. Pages are damaged with missing pieces that the author leaves like breadcrumbs for us to piece together as we go.

This one is something you must read to understand and even then you’ll still be left thinking about what else we don’t know. In this case, that’s a great thing. Very well done. 👏🏻

Richard and Evelyn are on their honeymoon, not where they planned on going, but where Richard’s mother has sent them. Unfortunately this is not the only surprise for the newly married couple. As they meet an eclectic group of people at the villa while waiting on a potentially dangerous storm they end up learning new things about each other as well as themselves. Fast paced, fascinating story that is difficult to put down.

This book was so unusual, i have never read a book like this one, where we get one POV, and I dislike the character, and then we get another POV, and I dislike that character as well, and even more as we stay in their POV’s. Richard and Evelyn are on their honeymoon in Greece, and already I was waiting for something to happen because clearly this isn’t an average couple, something is off. And I think I missed the whole mystery of the sleepwalkers lol.

Thank you Simon Books and Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book.

The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas is a dark domestic thriller. Evelyn and Richard are on their honeymoon, but their time spent with each other is anything but happy.

This book sort of tested my patience. The writing is unique for sure, but it is not for everyone. Written in a style of "I said, you said," the story unravels. It's very dark and touches upon very difficult subjects.

Thank you, Simon and Schuster, for this book.

Scarlet Thomas’s The Sleepwalkers is cleverly written. Told through artifacts such as letters, a few (unseen) photographs, and a voice recording, we are left to put the story together ourselves.

The book opens on newlyweds Richard and Evie, who are honeymooning on a bleak Greek island during the off-season. They clearly can’t stand each other, and the reasons for this slowly develop in a series of letters which were written for the other. While interesting, this style can often be frustrating as some letters end mid-thought, and the reader is left with a number of unanswered questions.

They are staying at the Villa Rosa, which you are led to believe is a resort, but which is, in actuality, a creepy old property run by Isabella (who clearly has a thing for Richard), where locking doors is forbidden, and there are no curtains on the honeymoon suite. It is also best known as the site of The Sleepwalkers — a married couple who drowned after a wife followed her sleepwalking husband into the sea. Was this a story of tragic love or of something far more nefarious? You’ll have to read the book to see, although it too does not have an ending.

While sometimes a slog to get through, I recommend this book for its style alone although it is not for everyone. 3.5 stars (rounded up) out of 5 stars.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a complimentary advanced reader’s copy of this book.

I was interested in this book because of the comparison to White Lotus. While there are some similarities, like broody rich couples on vacations in a creepy hotels, it did not thrill me as much as the show. The Sleepwalkers is told in long form letters that are unfinished due to damage to the paper they are written on. The plot was very disjointed. I think it was written this way on purpose, but I had a really hard time following the story because it was difficult to identify who was speaking. I am not entirely sure I understood the ending, I do think there is an audience for this book! It is incredibly unique and lovers of cerebral literary fiction on the weirder side will enjoy this one.

Thank you Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this ARC!

The Sleepwalkers is a captivating novel that delves into the themes of secrets, family curses, and the past resurfacing in the present. This fabulously sly and slippery tale follows a honeymoon that spirals from bad to worse and then even worse yet. Thomas' writing is vivid, scalpel-sharp, and impossible to put down.

What a unique read! This was told through letters in an epistolary style. Since the letters were recovered, there are gaps and parts where the letters just end - I assume this was purposeful and not just a fault with the e-galley which others have speculated. There are a few references to other works (like the myth of Persephone) that worked well throughout. This leans towards literary fiction more so than a thriller but there are thriller elements.

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.