Bonnie Saks is a graduate student, single mother and chronic insomniac whose life has begun to fray in several directions at once.

When she enters a university sleep study, the attempt to observe and regulate her sleeplessness becomes the novel’s organising device, placing her under literal surveillance. Cohen writes with a dry, quick intelligence about the humiliations of adult life: bad professional encounters, compromised relationships, financial precarity, the social theatre of academia, and the body refusing to cooperate with whatever plan the mind has devised for it.

Sleep here is a threshold state, one between control and surrender, vigilance and oblivion, the life one thinks one is managing and the one continuing underneath. Funny without becoming glib, it belongs to that particular strain of late-twentieth-century American fiction in which ordinary dysfunction becomes its own kind of existential weather. Very much in the spirit of Ottessa Moshfegh's 'Year of Rest and Relaxation'. 

Vintage Contemporaries / Random House, New York, 2002. First Vintage Contemporaries edition, first printing; originally published in hardcover by Scribner in 2001. Paperback. Light shelf wear; internally clean and sound.