Sleep A Novel

“Propulsive and funny and heartbreaking.” —J. Courtney Sullivan "An exceptionally moving novel. Jones takes her cues from writers like John Cheever, Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf."—The New York Times From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she was raised. Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made. Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away.