The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas

October Book Club

Book Club posts are for paid subscribers. A monthly subscription costs less than one tube of whitening toothpaste! Both promise things they might not deliver. Huge thanks to my newest subscribers, I can’t wait to write for you. I’ll be back in the bookshop on Friday, and will send the next Receipt from the Bookshop at closing time, free for all subscribers, as always. Here’s an exciting new bit of the pre-post waffle: You can pre-order my book, Receipts from the Bookshop, here. Anyway, let’s Book Club…

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I try not to select books for book club by authors I’ve already read. I generally want to discover the books at the same time as my readers, so that we can compare our experiences in the same time frame. But I have previously read novels by Scarlett Thomas, in fact, I think if you’d asked me about twenty years ago which sort of books I enjoy, I might have picked out The End of Mr Y., or PopCo. as examples. Unfortunately for me, I now have absolutely no memories of those novels, but I know I liked her writing enough to keep buying her work. I think I own about seven of her books, so I really expected to love The Sleepwalkers. The cover and comparisons did make me wonder if this was more of a commercial turn from Thomas - would this book be a bit lite for my book club, was she branching out into more basic thrillers for the mass-market?

I needn’t have worried. This one was formally experimental, narratively unpredictable and for me, really bloody frustrating.