Sleepless

A Novel

By: Romy Hausmann

Narrated by: Lucy Paterson, Michael Fenner, Heather Long

Dark secrets past and present collide in Sleepless, a haunting novel of guilt and retribution from Romy Hausmann, the international best-selling author of Dear Child.

It's been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she's wanted nothing more than to live a normal life: nice flat, steady job, even a few friends. But when one of those friends, Laura von Hoven - free-spirited beauty and wife of Nadja's boss - kills her lover and begs Nadja for her help, Nadja can't seem to refuse.

The two women make for a remote house in the woods, the perfect place to bury a body. But their plan quickly falls apart and Nadja finds herself outplayed, a pawn in a bizarre game in which she is both the perfect victim and the perfect murderer....

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books

©2021 Romy Hausmann (P)2021 Macmillan Audio

Great story with amazing performances

Many people seemed to dislike this book because it begins with several different threads of stories that are seemingly unrelated and can be somewhat disorienting and hard to follow. However, if you stick with it, these threads are deftly woven together into an intriguing and complex story that is very satisfying. The performances were superb as well.

not my favorite.

I struggled to pass chapter 14 ...
the story is diffuse, the narrators tried their best but all over is not this writer's best book. I'm sad because I really liked Dear Child.

Bad writing the narrators couldn't save

This story is so damn hard to track jumping between storylines and timelines with a different set of characters for each. One storyline was compelling. One was a big yawn. Another was so ambiguous that I couldn't find a point to it. I started and restarted several times. I focused, listening only to the story and not doing other tasks while it played. After four hours, I gave up. I wasn't the problem. This story isn't poorly written. It's badly written. I wonder where the editor was in all this.

The narrators were all good, but even their inflections in tone and cadence that normally help a reader track the action couldn't save this word salad.