The set up is excellent, and I loved the first 100 pages. The writing style is beautiful and dreamy, and like The Age of Miracles, has many, well-observed friendships between girls, and women that felt both real and refreshing. However, the novel also poses loads of questions that never get answered, which left me feeling unsatisfied, and the ending, while interesting, felt a bit like a sleight of hand.

For fans of Girlfriend In A Coma by Douglas Copeland, or The Book Of M by Peng Shepherd.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book as it far exceeded my expectations.
The story follows a group of people who are all live or work in the town of Santa Lora. There is an outbreak of an illness which is putting its victims into a deep sleep.
With the town on lockdown the story follows 3 groups of people and how the illness affects them and how they cope with the lockdown.
Story has lots of twists and turns and some surprising moments. Book was well written and could be perfectly believable.
I would recommend this book for all fans of thrillers and sci-fi.

"If, in the months before the sickness appeared, you had asked a specialist why it is that a human being spends part of every day unconscious, you might have heard an answer that's been around since at least the ancient Greeks: we sleep, the theory goes, in order to forget."

The town of Santa Lora is flush with a sleeping virus; it's airborne and does not discriminate. The Dreamers follow the citizens of this sleeping town as they struggle to stay awake, struggle to make sense of their dreams, and struggle to protect themselves from a virus that they don't understand.

The perspective of Sara & Libby, two young sisters, were my favourite. Their dad was a prepper - (for those of you who don't watch Netflix shows detailing how to survive a rapture or an apocalypse of some kind like my partner does; preppers are people who, you guessed it, prep. They store years and years worth of food, water, medical supplies and the like, preferring to be self sustaining than dependent on others in the event of the end of the world.) - and I though that this lent an even more serious note to the sleeping virus, even through the innocuous eyes of the two girls.

I realised as I was reading this book that there were so many different directions and what ifs the author could have taken it in, that leaving so much to the reader's imagination could be considered an amateur mistake in a science fiction, but this novel worked it to it's advantage,
"The things that could have happened but did not are just as crucial to a life as all the things that do."

Ironically, the prose did have a dreamlike quality to it, even when the narrative was following the characters who were 'awake', there seemed to be a dilute sense of possibility throughout the entirety of the novel.

I did find the ending a little lacklustre, nothing was given a thorough explanation and to put it bluntly, I expected more. A psychiatrist is introduced towards the beginning of the book, and she finds this disease baffling, and intriguing, and volunteers to get closer to it whereas so many other health professional stay away, I expected her to find something out at least, but her role in the story ends up being more subtle - to the point of non existence - than I would have liked. I found that extremely frustrating because I'm one of those readers who needs to know the why, the how, the when. For that reason, the ending was unsatisfactory for me.

I thought that this story was reminiscent of Sleeping Beauties by Stephen & Owen King with a few minor discrepancies. Although Kings' work has more violence than this book, but also more intricacy in it's detail as well.

All in all, a pretty solid Sci Fi with a resounding lack of ending.

Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I had to force myself to finish this book. It had all the elements I usually enjoy (apocalyptic threat, human reactions etc) but the story just didn't seem to come together for me. The ending was particularly unsatisfyingwith no apparent explanation for events.

I really, really enjoyed this. It is reminiscent of several stories i've read/watched before but it is still gripping and exciting. I thought the way the author has chosen to switch periodically from character to character was great in that we got insight into how the virus started and how different people reacted. It was definitely interesting how people reacted to it and I thought it was a good balance of being believable and so shocking.

The only thing I could possibly say I was disappointed in was the ending - I thought it was a little anticlimactic, although I'm not sure which, if any, kind of ending would be fitting so maybe it's for the best.

Would definitely read again though.

A previously unknown virus appears on the university campus of an isolated Californian town. The victims fall asleep and cannot be woken. Those caring for the sick succumb to the illness themselves. Eventually the federal government takes the step, unprecedented in over a hundred years, of surrounding the town with a cordon sanitaire enforced by the military.

Against this backdrop the novel follows a group of characters as their community disintegrates around them and the virus draws ever nearer. Some of the victims do eventually wake but they struggle to differentiate the reality they encounter from their dreams and this confusion is mirrored in the book's branching narratives, some of which, it becomes clear, may only be taking place within the sleeping minds of the victims.

Like The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker's previous novel, The Dreamers explores the assumptions and rituals that hold a society together and how these can so easily be unpicked. There's a plaintive quality to the understated but beautifully-crafted writing writing that left me feeling slightly stunned and with a lingering sense of the fragility of the world

A strange story of a post apocalyptic town. There is Mei, a quiet reserved student, Ben & Annie the new parents, young Sara & Libby with their father. All characters I feel I got to know. All at the mercy of this strange virus. This is science fantasy at its best. Fiction with glimpses of reality. What if?

I loved The Age of Miracles, and found this to be just as compelling. It is a beautifully written story of a virus which hits a small town and sends its victims into a dreamful sleep. Some die, some recover, and the virus plays itself out and moves on. Within this premise are the human stories of the victims and their families, coupled with a touch of mysticism. Are the dreams predictions of the future?

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy. This was beautifully written, ethereal, weird and captivating. Love that it was told from multiple perspectives and I raced through it as I cared about the characters and was intrigued about the mystery of the illness.

When a strange illness takes over a town, one by one, people begin to succumb to the mysterious symptoms.

I LOVED this book. I read it in one go and was completely absorbed - I loved the premise, the writing, the characters, everything about it. As I followed the story of individuals, I found myself floating along with the vague sense of panic that grips the town - it felt real. Walker's descriptions are eerie and powerful, unsettling somehow, as if we're in the town, yet disconnected at the same time.

I loved how this novel tells a dystopian story, yet it doesn't feel far-fetched or impossible. The people feel real, their reactions feel real, the reaction of the authorities and the surrounding country isn't impossible, and I think that is what makes it so unsettling. It's set in our times, and I was left thinking that each twist in the story was plausible, yet in some way removed.

This book is fantastic. Thoroughly recommended!

I hadn't realised this was by the same author as the Age of Miracles. I would have been even more keen to read had I known.
This,like the last, felt refreshing,a new idea.
Admittedly we've probably all read about a mystery virus and isolation for it...
But the idea of a sleeping sickness really intrigued me... with few signs it was coming and for a good part of the book,less signs it was leaving.
Throw into that ,people of different ages and backgrounds and how they'd all survive,in a town on lock down.
I raced through it.
It almost felt like a bonus to then have some people wake and talk of disorientation and the dreams they had and what effect they were to have on them.
I'll be telling people to buy this one for sure.

I really enjoyed this book and Karen Thompson Walker is a great writer. If there was a half star I would have rated it 3.5. It tells the story of a town in which residents, mysteriously start falling asleep. It becomes an epidemic, and the situation is declared a national crisis.

My main issue was with the structure. It took too long to get to the meat of the story, and then the ending felt rushed. There were quite a few questions left unanswered, and whilst I suspect that was the author’s intention, for me this felt disappointing. Still a good read though.

A small college town in California is hit with a sleeping sickness that starts in a college girls dorm room. The sickness spreads eventaully throughout the town as we follow the lives of a range of residents: thecollege outsider Mei, Mathhew an idealistic maverick student, Rebecca a religious student enjoying sone new found freedom, a young couple of lecturers new to town and with a new baby, their strange neighbour who is a widower and survivalist with two daughters and an older gay couple . We follow their lives through some flashbacks, the present and the dreams they have when they sleep. Are they echoes of the past, glimpses of the future or an alternative lived reality?

I enjoyed this book, it was really well written and held all the threads together. well for the most part I felt that the gay couple were a bit underwritten and also that Mei, who I was rooting for from the first page got a bit lost in the narrative towards the end. Catherine, the psychologist's story was also under developed. but these are minor quibbles. The prose flows gently almost as somnolent at times as that of the sleepers and their dreams. It was a great bedtime read. I'll definitely be checking out this writers other books.

A small Californian town is under threat when a mysterious virus starts spreading from the local college; people fall asleep and can't be woken. Karen Thompson Walker handles the material very efficiently, building up an atmosphere of disbelief that escalates gradually until the town is cut off from the outside world by a 'cordon sanitaire'. No one is allowed in; no one can leave. The disease affects everyone, from the smallest new-born baby to the elderly and confused living in a nursing home. There are echoes of Camus' The Plague and of Rip Van Winkle, laced with theories about sleep and dreaming from ancient Greece via Freud to the latest findings of neuroscientists. All against a quietly smouldering background of global warming: the lake is drying up, trees are slowly dying and the whole area is at the risk of devastating forest fires.
The sense that this illness affects all is echoed by the way the story is told from several viewpoints with no one central character: a young fresher who doesn't fit in; two young sisters with an eccentric father; a professor grieving for his partner and a young couple patching together their marriage with a new baby amongst others.
The Dreamers is a subtle story where reality and dreaming become mixed, and the decisions we take in how to live our lives are put under the microscope. A quietly devastating page-turner.

It is not often that the premise of the book is so completely captured within the content. But this is one of those times. Walker writes like a waking dream; a muted, seen through clouded glass distancing throughout the novel. And it works perfectly. As we read about the sleeping sickness travelling through the community, we feel the slow, sucking sleep of the dreamers. We feel the paranoia and tension - but through a glass darkly, so to speak. And it evokes such a sense of veiled horror at the inevitability of sleep - which is probably the cleverest part of the novel. We all must sleep. Every one of us. Not only that, but we must sleep at least once every couple of days. To have something so essential turned into a potential enemy is a potent thing.
I'd say Walker evokes some of the classic distancing of Atwood at times, where we feel this could be happening right now, or in the future, or maybe it happened long ago and this is just the record of it, and it works to good effect in The Dreamers.
I would recommend this book to readers that like Atwood, or readers that enjoy the feeling of being pulled hazily through a story, without a sharp and defined beginning middle and end.

I love literary fiction with a speculative twist (I don't think anybody is surprised to hear that) and I heard absolutely amazing things about this book before starting it. The book does a wonderful way of depicting a potential world-ending plague without the bells and whistles of post-apocalyptic fiction. Set in a fictional college town in California where one after the other people start falling asleep and not waking up again, this book has a fairy-talesque mood that I just adored.

For me the book worked best in the overarching moments, when the narrative flits between different people and never comes close enough to add humanity to them. I found the prose in those sections stunning and the distance created worked really well for me. Here it read more like a parable than a classical science fiction book and I just loved this a whole lot. I adored how the authors opened up the closed narrative to give glimpses of the outside world and her depiction of the greater world's reaction to the unknown illness was believable.

Karen Thompson Walker emphasizes the relationship between parents and their children, which I obviously enjoyed, but my favourite relationship was that between two sisters who were left alone after their doomsday-prepper father succumbs to the illness. Sibling relationships are a particular weakness of mine and those two sisters felt very real. I do think that the book was not always successful when changing gear from the birds-eye perspective to a more closely observed narrative style, but I enjoyed the reading experience immensely nonetheless.

The Dreamers was a lyrical, beautifully immersive novel, taking the premise of an unknown virus spreading throughout an unsuspecting small town and within that exploring intriguing themes of time and memory.

It starts at a college, a girl goes to sleep and simply does not wake up. Like domino’s more fall, slowly spreading outwards – scientists, Doctors, specialists, arriving in droves but nobody knows what this sickness is or how to cure it. The one certain thing is that all these sleepers are busy dreaming…

Through the eyes of various town inhabitants, we watch this strange and unpredictable illness occur, see the town cut off, feel the low key panic, the helplessness and the worry. As the outside world watches, time is an elusive thing for these few, as it is it seems for those struck by the virus. It is a clever narrative, a fully formed character drama – the emphasis being very much on the human condition, how we distinguish dreams from reality, if indeed we can at all…and how we cope with untenable situations where resolution seems impossible.

I loved this because it ignored the usual trope of people fighting over scraps, hurting each other, but showed how we both isolate ourselves and come together in times of trauma. The differing personalities we meet give a snapshot of time, an enclosed event where only those in it can know it. The author gives outcomes but allows the reader to consider the possibilities – It is melancholy and thought provoking.

I loved it. A little dark delight.

Recommended.

Haunting and lyrical. Very rare is a good book surrounding an outbreak that doesn’t focus on the actual science behind it, but this one did I just fine.

A highly contagious virus is taking out the community of Santa Lora. First to succumb are students at the local college, all falling into a deep dreamy sleep from which they cannot be woken.

Even with the college grounds in quarantine, inevitably the virus escapes into the wider community.

A wealth of characters tie the reader into the story: Ben, his wife Annie and their new baby Grace; Mei and Matthew – students, still awake, and trying their best to help others; Nathaniel and his two daughters who’ve already prepared for an apocalyptic scenario with a stockpile of goods in their basement.

Loved this read – I cared deeply about all the characters, and enjoyed the philosophical slant to the narrative – exploring dreaming and the unconscious. Definitely an author to pick up again.

"O Sleep, come for me, I will go quietly,
where the roof doesn’t leak in my heart.

O Sleep, come for me, I’m a boat, sprung a leak,
I’ll hide and you’ll seek a new start for me.
Til dawn, I’ll be too gone to care how grey the day is.
The dreams that it chases away, they stay asleep.

O Sleep, come for me, I will come willingly,
like a leaf from a tree in October..."
- Lisa Hannigan, O Sleep

The Dreamers is the sophomore effort from Karen Thompson Walker, author of the novel The Age of Miracles. The story opens with Mei, a student in a university in the small fictional town of Santa Lora, California, who discovers that her roommate has fallen into a deep sleep that she cannot be woken from. At the hospital, it is revealed that this bout of deep sleep is a sickness - a contagious virus - that renders its victims comatose (in the sleep-sense) for weeks or months on end. The sickness soon spreads throughout the university grounds before spilling over into the local neighborhoods and small town, affecting a host of characters: more of Mei's classmates and more university students; two local children, Sara and Libby, and their father; Ben and Annie, a young married couple, and their three-week-old daughter, Grace; Nathaniel, a university faculty member. We don't know how its victims are chosen, but the sickness seems to affect people of all ages and all walks of life, ensnaring them in a perpetual sleep that triggers life-altering dreams. And that's what is so interesting here: these victims, in their sleep, display an unusual amount of brain activity and they dream. They dream about the past, about the present and, interestingly, about the future. Each state of dreaming is unique to the dreamer, just as the virus affects each victim in a different way.

I think this is a very well written and constructed novel. The author handles this small-town catastrophe very well. As panic beings to build in Santa Lora, a quarantine is established. Classes are cancelled, the number of cases increases and food supplies run low. But nothing here is overdone. Just like the dreamers themselves, there is a quiet and a gentleness to this virus, and a subtlety to how Thompson Walker portrays this. There is a normality to the chaos, which we are regularly reminded of, and that maintains the humanness here. Parents must care for their children, pet owners must feed their pets and teenagers still fall in love. Life goes on all around Santa Lora, just as life goes on for the victims who dream, in whatever form that may be.

There is certainly a dystopian, apocalyptic feel to this novel but I would class it more as character-driven science-fiction story with fairytale elements. The prose and the story are hypnotic and the book is filled with wonderfully emotive passages that make this a truly memorable read. I particularly loved the sections where Ben is left to look after his newborn daughter when his wife falls asleep. The constant attachment he is forced to endure with his dependent and vulnerable baby is both a blessing and a struggle, and it was heart-wrenching to watch him try to cope alone with both the huge grief he was experiencing and the mundane activities of the everyday - the new baby sleep schedule, the feeding, the changing. It really struck a cord with me. And I find that typical, now, of Thompson Walker's work: she is a beautiful writer, one that has the ability to evoke true emotion in her balance of the weird and the normal.

The Dreamers is a stunning novel; a mesmerising story about life and love, dreams and reality, and the nature of consciousness. I highly recommend it. Four and a half stars.