The Shapeless Unease

This genre-defying debut memoir by Betty Trask Prize winner, Samantha Harvey, weaves a tapestry of confessional anguish, flash fiction, cathartic poetry, and feverish observations on politics and psychology in a transcendent search for reality and truth.

In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help.

The Shapeless Unease is Harvey's darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death, and the will to survive, from "this generation's Virginia Woolf" (Telegraph).

©2020 Samantha Harvey (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Harvey’s voice is perfect

As a sometime insomniac, I resonated with her agonies, described in ways that I could not.
I also loved all the interim anecdotes.

Brilliant

A brilliant, mordantly funny and more than courageous book by a writer who stands out for the rigor of her thinking and her prose. This book will startle you with its crackling descriptions, its range, its beauty, its inquest into pain and human existence. There is something unique here in the juxtaposition of the brutal hardship the author is enduring and the delicacy of her words. Truly memorable, especially this audiobook version read by Harvey herself.