I really enjoyed this book, but I do have some issues with it. Maybe issues is too strong a word, a few things that niggled me, but all the way through.

Some thing(s) I liked:
✅Well written
✅Enjoyable
✅Twisty

Some thing(s), not so much:
⭕Tony is clearly a piece of crap and honestly, he doesn't redeem himself at the end by finally noticing his wife. He's a terrible person and not once is he held accountable.
⭕I cottoned on the second (well technically first) meeting with "Maggie" that she was a figment of Lu's imagination. I feel the author made it too obvious if that was supposed to be one of the big twists. She appears, there's no sound of the door, she doesn't sleep, she doesn't eat, she doesn't drink, she reads Lu's mind, she doesn't speak to anyone else, even a third of the ays through people are pointing out that Lu is always alone when she talks about Maggie.
⭕Dan and his wife are also terrible people.
⭕There is no way Tony is as much of a gym bunny as he pretends. He literally eats like a teenager in his mum's basement. He only eats cheese, eggs and bread. Not the diet of a health conscious adult.

Looking forward to reading more by Simmonds.

Had me hooked from the first page to the last
So many twist and turns you will not want to put this book down
A brilliant read
Can’t wait for her next book
Thanks Netgalley

Lu is tired, dead tired. Not quite as dead as her neighbour down the road though. From the night she was sleepwalking and woke up in the road covered in bloody and no memory of how she got there.

Since her son Riley was born, Lu can’t get enough sleep. Her partner and family are useless, and the only person who seems to notice she’s struggling is her next door neighbour Maggie, who steps in to help.

Lu still doesn’t feel rested. And is Maggie taking over a bit too much? Suddenly Lu’s partner Tony is missing, and Lu is missing chunks of time. Did she do something to her own partner? The way she might have done to the neighbour?

This book had me tense and anxious!!! As someone with ME/CFS I know that anxiety of counting how many hours of sleep you get (or don’t get) and how that makes you more anxious.

I can also relate to having post partum anxiety and post partum depression (although I never daydreamed about killing people. Sorry, that’s all on you Lu.)

I think because in some ways I could relate to Lu, while also being somewhat horrified by her daydreaming, and the way her family and partner treated her, I found this book so compelling, and couldn’t put it down.

This was my first book of Natali Simmonds that I’ve read, and I’m definitely looking forward to reading more of her work.

This was NOT a favorite of mine at all. I would have preferred a trigger warning especially for this book. I was beyond confused with the plot and then so disappointed by the ending.

Thrilling and completely addictive. I loved this one so much! Brilliant from start to finish! Very highly recommend this book and this author!

While My Baby Sleeps by Natali Simmonds and narrated by Sofia Zervudachi was an excellent book from start to finish and I loved it; This was a book that gripped me from the beginning and I found it hard to turn this audiobook off and WoW, loved the ending I did not see that coming - Superb!

The narrator Sofia Zervudachi was excellent she pulled you into this book and made you apart of it!

I was lucky to receive the ebook and I was able to use both forms to enjoy the book.

I highly recommend While My Baby Sleeps - Perfect 5 star book

Big thank you to NetGalley, Bookouture and Bookouture Audio for an audio ARC of this book.

Love my domestic thrillers and this one did not disappoint. It held my interest from the beginning. The ending was spectacular and what I enjoyed most about it.

Big thanks to Bookouture for a copy on Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
While My Baby Sleeps is an ok read, it starts off strong and dips in the middle and gets a little repetitive.
Lu is a stay at home mum with Riley her little boy.
While her partner, Tony is extremely busy at work and is briefly home, Lu is having trouble sleeping.
While she should be asleep at night, Tony is working and Riley is in bed, Lu is wide awake and hearing the night go by.
Strange things happen and Lu is experiencing paranoia and being emotional.
But all is not what it seems…..
A quick read, pace is gradual and plot is a slightly sluggish.
I found the plot slightly predictable and for me there was no surprises.
It didn’t have my full attention as much as it could have.
In my opinion, I felt Lu could have been more vocal in needing help.
A mystery thriller without the thrills.

Wow this book had me fooled. I really enjoyed it, thought I had figured everything out and then in the last few chapters I was blown away by the absolutely shocking twist.

Fantastic writing, a great plotline and plenty of red herrings. This was an outstanding book.

I really enjoyed this fast paced book! Hooked me from the start and while I figured out one twist, the other I didn’t! Great on audiobook as well!

Tw are pregnancy and postpartum depression. Both are heavily written about so please be aware before you read this book.

I would definitely recommend her book and look forward to reading more by her.

Feeling tired? I hope that, like me, you don't know the meaning of the word. (4.5 stars)

My calendar over the last two weeks has gone something like this:

Week 1: plan to take the time off work to have a blitz on some home decorating. Realise that, after it's taken 3 days to strip paint of two skirting boards and half of one balustrade, that a week isn't going to be anywhere near long enough. Realise also that the amount of dust generated by an electric sander is horrendous, and that if paint stripper doesn't stink, it doesn't work. Pause to respond to a few work emails that just won't wait. Spend the next day-and-a-half painting some walls with emulsion, just so it would look like I'd achieved something.

Weekend: go to London to see Abba Voyage. It was fantastic, and well worth driving for a 300-mile round trip.

Week 2: go back to work, and spend most of the week playing catch-up.

Weekend: try to fit a bit more decorating in on Saturday trying to get some more decorating in, and then spend Sunday at a workshop to encourage me to do some more of my own writing. It was successful, but my brain didn't know what had hit it.

Ordinarily, I'd have said today that I was feeling tired.

The thing is, though, that I've been using my last wakeful moments whilst all this was going on to read While My Baby Sleeps by Natali Simmonds. Which has explained to me, clearly and terrifyingly, that what I' actually feeling right now is nothing at all.

On the face of it, the situation that Natali has created for her main character, Lu, this time round is very different from that which she had previously written for Em in her novel Good Girls Die Last. But it works for exactly the same reason: it's perhaps a bit extreme, but it never feels it because each aspect is completely relatable. She's a new mum, and her baby son never sleeps through the night. She's recently moved to a new area and has no real friends. She can't really call on her family for help, because her parents live abroad and she's not close to her brother and his wife. And her partner Tony works night shifts. So it's left entirely to Lu to cater for her baby's every need, including waking when he cries in the night. Every night. Every. Single. Night.

But how to explain the continuous, relentless and oh, so overpowering exhaustion that this creates to people who just don't understand? To a partner who is never there? To acquaintances met in the local park, or at playgroup, who all seem, at least outwardly, to be coping better than you are? And even if you felt able, how do you even find the vocabulary? All poor Lu can think of to say is "I'm tired", which doesn't even begin to convey what she's really going through.

The storyline feels authentic, and that's because it is. Natali - again, much as she did in Good Girls Die Last, and again, successfully - used her own experiences to put herself into the main character. This works, not only because it makes the beginning of the book feel more personal but also because, when some perhaps less probable, but still plausible curveballs were thrown in, I was still ready to believe every word. What if the only person who seems to understand what you're having to deal with is your neighbour's sister, who is a stranger to you? And what if you wake up outside your front door, with blood on your hands and no idea how it got there? And then learn that an antisocial neighbour has been murdered ... ?

Unlike some other reviewers, I didn't mind that much of the first two-thirds of the book felt repetitive. To me, this just helped it seem more real. I could easily understand how Lu's thoughts would be much the same every day, apart from them becoming increasingly angry and violent as, day by day, she became a little more desperate. I also didn't mind that Tony is portrayed as being extremely selfish and self-centred, because I could see that he needed to be that way for the story to work. And, whilst I did start to feel a bit annoyed at the seemingly very naive trust that Lu was prepared to put into her only friend Maggie, I forgave this when the truth was revealed. Because, wow. I hadn't seen it coming at all and yet it made perfect, horrible sense.

My gripes with this book lie in part with some of the details. Would it really be the case, for example, that you'd have no idea what day of the week it was if you lost your phone? Especially if you also have a laptop? Mostly, though, I thought that the ending didn't work as well as the rest of the book. After the slow build-up, it all felt a bit rushed. I'd have liked a longer explanation of what had really happened to Lu, and how - even though I appreciate that it would probably have been very hard for Natali to write. And, for the same reason really, I didn't think that the final twist at the end worked at all, because there simply hadn't been enough time to develop the idea.

Let's be clear, though: these are niggles. And to be put off reading a book because of these would be akin to not wanting to go on holiday to your favourite resort if you couldn't see the sea from the only remaining hotel room. Or refusing to eat a plate of your favourite meal because you didn't like the dressing on the side salad.

What's far more important is that Natali Simmonds has managed not only to tell a gripping and often moving story, but also raise awareness of a condition in such a personal way that even I - a mere man who isn't even the father of a child - could understand. And for that she deserves my congratulations, and thanks.

My thanks also to Bookouture and Netgalley for the digital ARC of this book, which was published by Bookouture on 7th February. I will publish my review on my blog as well as Goodreads, Amazon and my social media pages.

Natali Simmonds' book My Daughter's Revenge was outstanding, so I was very excited about this book. I appreciate the fact that this author does not shy away from difficult topics. I also enjoyed the ever-mounting suspense throughout the book. I love a good unreliable narrator, and the switch between what was reality and what wasn't kept me guessing up until the very end. The plot was clever, and there were lies and With that being said, I found this book to be somewhat repetitive, and I felt that this story could've been slightly shorter.

The narrator, Sofia Zervudachi, did a phenomenal job bringing all of the characters to life and building the mounting suspense as the story developed.

This suspense thriller had me suspecting what was going on, but it tied things up with some surprises. And there’s a jaw-dropping twist at the end!

I enjoyed the soothing & perfectly timed suspense-growing narration by Sofia Zervudachi.

Thank you, Natali Simmonds, Bookouture, Bookouture audio & netgalley for my copy! All opinions are my own.

This book is incredibly hard to put down!! I literally could not read it fast enough, an amazing thriller with a twist that I did not see coming!!!

Simmonds smashes it out of the park again with another stonker of a thriller. It's got five stars written all over it, as did her previous books!

I went into the book blind with no idea of the uncertainty that awaited me. The story flows fast and with my bingeing skills I had it finished in a few hours. I couldn't leave it half way through.

It had me gripped from the opening chapters and had me invested right up to the end. Why did I not see that one coming? I had no idea!

Brilliant characters, a disorientating plot and unpredictability.

Superb book, absolutely loved it!

Louise (Lu) is mum to eleven month old Riley, recently having moved house with her partner Tony, she is struggling to sleep and it's leaving her with huge blanks in her memory and having seriously bad thoughts about those around her, so much so that she finds herself locked out of her house in the early hours of the morning with blood all over her hands and her pyjamas, and no recollection of what happened, then a police officer turns up at her door declaring her neighbour has been found dead on his doorstep, could Lu be responsible for what happened to him, it appears that Maggie, another neighbours sister, is the only one that knows and she promises to be there for Lu, when nobody else is, but can Maggie be trusted and is she really who she says she is?

While My Baby Sleeps is the new thriller by this author and it pulled me in firmly from the prologue and I knew I was in for a bumpy ride. Lu has been struggling since giving birth to Riley nearly a year ago and it's no wonder, with no family support, a husband that works nights, seven days a week and a new house to contend with is enough to make the strongest person eventually reach breaking point. This is a fast paced thriller, with a sliding doors persona, which kept me on the edge of my seat throughout, told from the perspective of Lu, with many twists and highlighting a condition that a lot of new mums suffer, often going unnoticed for a long time. The author keeps the reader intrigued on this rollercoaster ride of suspense and horror and I was praying that Lu would get the help she needed and prove, for her own sanity, that she'd not committed any crimes. I loved the cliffhanger of an ending, could this be the opening for a sequel? Simmonds is a new to me author and I look forward to reading more of her work.

I'd like to thank Bookouture and Netgalley for the auto approval, I will post my review on Amazon and Goodreads.

I wasn't able to get into this one, it just didn't work for me. I am unsure why, I think I just didn't click with the writing. I had to DNF.

Lu has recently had a baby but is struggling with a lack of sleep and having terrible rages. One night she finds herself locked out of her house with no memory of how she got there but luckily her neighbour Maggie is there to help. The next day she sees police outside and finds out a different neighbour has been killed, the neighbour who she has been furious with for weeks.

I read my first book by this author not so long ago (My Daughter’s Revenge) and really enjoyed it so I knew I wanted to read the new book by Natali Simmonds. This had a slightly different vibe to the last book but I still really enjoyed it. I absolutely love how the author weaves such a tense, dramatic story, which creates a creepy, disturbing atmosphere.

The story is told in the voice of Lu and you really start to feel her anxieties and journey into despair. Once I picked this up I could not put it down, I was hooked to the intense and crazed writing style, while changing my mind what to believe. The story created a range of emotions from anger to empathy, which I know means it is a gripping read. The story is repetitive which I don’t usually love but here it really works to understand the character’s mindset and create a frantic ambience. This is a great book to pick up if you enjoy suspenseful, intense psychological thrillers with unreliable narrators and a dark plot. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this copy in return for an honest review.

While My Baby Sleeps by Natali Simmonds is a well written psychological thriller filled with brilliant twists and turns throughout that will have you gripped from the beginning till the very end, It was a brilliant read and a book that was hard to put down once you started to read it.

Thank you to NetGalley, Natali Simmonds, and Bookouture for the ebook. As someone who is postpartum, this book was incredibly emotional. The portrayal of postpartum and its progression into psychosis was masterfully done. It’s a gripping thriller with shocking twists at the end that will leave you speechless.