Samantha Harvey

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).

**Featured on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read** 'A profound meditation on language and loss and time, and on how we construct ourselves through stories. And it's painful. And it's beautiful. And I love it.' NATHAN FLIER Samantha Harvey's insomnia arrived, seemingly, from nowhere; for a year she has spent her nights chasing sleep that rarely comes. She's tried everything to appease it. Nothing is helping. What happens when one of the basic human needs goes unmet? For Samantha Harvey, extreme sleep deprivation resulted in a raw clarity about life itself. Original and profound, The Shapeless Unease is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and grief, and the will to survive. 'A delight to read... ineffably rewarding' OBSERVER 'Easily one of the truest and best books I've read about what it's like to be alive now, in this country' MAX PORTER 'How can a book about a sensual deprivation be so sensuous and so full? ... it seemed to give my sleep resonance and poetry. What a beautiful book.' TESSA HADLEY

**FROM THE AUTHOR OF 2024 BOOKER PRIZE WINNING ORBITAL****SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE 2019**15th century Oakham, in Somerset; a tiny village cut off by a big river with no bridge. When a man is swept away by the river in the early hours of Shrove Saturday, an explanation has to be found: accident, suicide or murder? The village priest, John Reve, is privy to many secrets in his role as confessor. But will he be able to unravel what happened to the victim, Thomas Newman, the wealthiest, most capable and industrious man in the village? And what will happen if he can’t? Moving back in time towards the moment of Thomas Newman’s death, the story is related by Reve – an extraordinary creation, a patient shepherd to his wayward flock, and a man with secrets of his own to keep. Through his eyes, and his indelible voice, Harvey creates a medieval world entirely tangible in its immediacy.

Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial PrizeLonglisted for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for FictionLonglisted for the 2015 Jerwood PrizeIn the middle of a winterâ??s night, a woman wraps herself in a blanket, picks up a pen and starts writing to an estranged friend.

From acclaimed Booker Prize Winner, Orange Prize and Guardian First Book Award finalist Samantha Harvey, a stunning novel of female friendship, betrayal, and revenge"You were going to work your way into my marriage and you were going to call its new three-way shape holy," writes the unnamed narrator of Dear Thief. The thief is Nina, or Butterfly, who disappeared eighteen years earlier and who is being summoned by this letter, this bomb, these recollections, revisions, accusations, and confessions." Sometimes I imagine, out of sheer playfulness, that I am writing this as a kind of defence for having murdered and buried you under the patio." Dear Thief is a letter to an old friend, a song, a jewel, and a continuously surprising triangular love story. Samantha Harvey writes with a dazzling blend of fury and beauty about the need for human connection and the brutal vulnerability that need exposes." While I write my spare hand might be doing anything for all you know; it might be driving a pin into your voodoo stomach." Dear Thief is a rare novel that traverses the human heart in a striking and indelible way.

When a young student follows William's arguments to a shocking conclusion, it appears William has already set his own fate in motion. Against a backdrop of tabloid frenzy, Leonard can only watch as William embraces the danger in the only way he knows how, which threatens to consume not only himself, but his entire family.

The "stunning" (The Guardian) debut novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital, about a man who is losing his past to Alzheimer's--also a Booker Prize nominee and an Orange Prize finalist "Closer to Virginia Woolf's meditative novels than anything else I can think of. . . . This is . . . Mrs. Dalloway prose."--The Washington Post Book WorldJake is in the tailspin of old age. His wife has passed away, his son is in prison, and, as Alzheimer's takes hold of him, his memories have become increasingly unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? Why is his son imprisoned? And why can't he shake the memory of a yellow dress and one lonely, echoing gunshot? The Wilderness holds us in its grip from the first sentence to the last with the sheer beauty of its language and its ruminations on love and loss.

He has lost his wife, his son is in prison and he is about to lose his past. Jake has Alzheimer's. As the disease takes hold of him, the key events of his life shift, and what until recently seemed solid fact melts into surreal imaginings.