While we get a unique look into Thea’s perspective as a scientist at the end of the world there is a lot of inner dialogue. That can feel too long and if that is not what you’re interested in this might not be for you. I enjoyed having such details into Thea’s personality, her way of thinking changes drastically as the story progresses. The change was fascinating making it very clear to me in the end on why we were so focused on her inner thoughts.

It’s so hard for me to write this review since I don’t want to give any spoilers. The book is very character driven following Thea in the present and her life before how her actions and life have led to now. I easily fell into the story getting vivid images off Theas perspective. Going through so many emotions with Thea and the interest/confusion from the story lol. We get a lot of information on the sleepless and minor characters there is a lot that is not mentioned. Leaving me with many questions about the world and Thea. The book has my attention and interest from the beginning excited to know more until the end where I was even questioning Thea’s perspective. I loved every bit of it.

Thanks to NetGalley and Angry Robot publishing I received a ARC for an honest review !

Thank you, Angry Robot and NetGalley, for providing me with an ARC of Laura Elliott’s, Awakened.

Laura Elliott’s Awakened pulled me two ways. I loved the plot, and the voice – though verbose in places – was beautiful and vivid. But I somehow never managed to really connect with main character Thea, and turning the final page, I was surprised there wasn’t any more.

Because of these mixed feelings I rounded 3.5 stars down to 3. But I Laura’s other novels are on my TBR stack, because the good parts in Awakened were really good.

Awakened is a tough review - there are a lot of positives, but equally there are elements I struggled with.
The positives - the sense of world building is great - the narrow existence within the Tower of London whilst the sleepless control silent streets is excellent, and the flashbacks gradually exposing what took place to create this dystopia are creepily effective.
I found the philosophical considerations of sleep, scientific endeavour / abuse and what it means to be human rather interesting - more depth than in your average horror.
The sleepless themselves were excellent with some real heart in mouth moments (the church!), and an interesting dynamic with the unexpected ‘visitors’. The relationship here was particularly strong.

On the other hand- such a slow start. I really struggled to maintain interest to begin with and I must have been 1/4 of the way in before I started really getting going.
The majority of the characters felt thinly sketched; arguably this is a factor of ‘diary entries’ and that’s a legit in world reason, but one that makes caring difficult.
The ending didn’t land well for me- the big reveal was perhaps overly signposted beforehand, but after that I rather lost what I was meant to be drawing from it. Interesting, but not as successful as the previous 2/3 of the book had built me up to expect.
Overall, an interesting curates egg.

I should've loved this book… Sci-fi and zombies are my favorite things; the premise is so interesting! Unfortunately, I only made it to 19% in the book. The book is primarily told in personal and scientific journal entries, which is unique. The wordy writing became annoying when the story wasn't focused on the Sleepless or the survivors. Similar to other reviews, there were many flashbacks, and it took me away from the main story, and I started to lose interest in finishing because of it. The flashbacks were just too excessive, and I started skimming chapters. When the story introduced the survivors, I was excited to learn more about them and to get to a major point in the story. Still, then the flashbacks continued and took away my curiosity and excitement. I wanted to learn more about the survivors and how London had fallen to the Sleepless, just anything related to the Sleepless, so everything else that got in the way of that was frustrating. Despite not finishing the story, I didn't have a bad time, but I also didn't have a good time while reading.

Thank you to Angry Robot & NetGalley for the e-ARC!

Continuing my lucky streak on ARC Netgalley copies - Awakened in another banger.

Admittedly I'm a little biased because this book addressing a topic I find myself thinking about often... What if we could turn off sleep?

In an interesting quirk Elliott's story leans a little into cheesy horror elements (I don't want to spoil anything but lets just say technology eliminating sleep does monstrously) but then leans BACK into philosophical and psychological takes, which creates an interesting feeling book. There is a lot of tension and violence bubbling under the surface, including one very interesting foreboding but also poetic reference, much of the tale is nuanced and a battle of wills/values rather than physical danger.

The story ends ambiguously, I THINK I get it but will have to wait for wider release to have spoiler discussions!! and my only real beef with this story is it felt like the secondary characters were a little undercooked, despite the setting being an isolated and relatively small settlement it felt like minor characters just appeared when needed and never anytime else :)

Thea is a medical researcher who is investigating the use of technology to minimise sleep in order to give people more waking time. The premise is interesting and definitely something I could see being investigated in the future. Set in a dystopian London in the late 21st century, we follow Thea as she writes about her experiences and companions. Set out as a journal, it has quite a formal writing style which suits the scientific nature of the character, and becomes more chaotic towards the end as the plot begins to unravel.

This was quite an unusual take on the zombie apocalypse trope, with a focus more on the ethical dilemmas of research and the humanity of the zombies rather than the usual gore and threat. It addresses really well the downfalls of some of the health systems we have in place, and it gives a great insight into the struggles of people with chronic pain and invisible illnesses. As a scientist, I really appreciated the detail of descriptions forming the basis of the research, which made it feel more realistic. If you love black mirror, then this is probably for you!

Themes
🧟‍♂️Zombies 🇬🇧Dystopian London
👩‍🔬Scientist FMC ♿️Disability Rep

with thanks to Angry Robot, the author and Netgalley for access to this eARC.

'Science has stolen sleep and awakened a world of horror.'

Scientists have retreated to the Tower of London, desperately trying to survive an onslaught that they were responsible for bringing upon the world. Microchips embedded in people’s brains to stop them sleeping have backfired and the world has changed dramatically with it.

What a concept, what a premise! I was so excited to start this book and even bumped it up my ARC pile in my anticipation to read it. However, what I was left with was some great ideas hidden beneath sadly poor execution.

The book is laid out in diary entry form and we are immediately thrown into a science experiment, as the group of survivors attempt to examine one of the Sleepless. This creepy, zombie-like creature is well portrayed, and the events captured my attention from the off. We are then time jumped forward to the next month and two survivors enter the fray. I was intrigued by their story, who they were and what happened to them, but again, after introducing them and piquing my interest we then time jump a month again. Laura Elliot is trying to get to specific date at the end to make part of the plot make sense, but in doing so sacrifices the reader’s engagement with what is happening.

There are also flashbacks to how the Sleepless came to be which is interesting, but they aren’t well signposted in the novel, so I was confused in places which timeline we were in. There are also a lot of ramblings about ethical dilemmas, science and philosophy. These started out ok but began to slow the pace and distract from the storylines that I wanted to progress, as well as becoming repetitive at times. I just wanted to learn more about the survivors, find out what happened to bring the Sleepless to the world and reach some kind of conclusion and any of the padding that wasn’t relevant to this just irritated me.

I was ready to give this book 3 stars until I got to the ending which was sadly very disappointing. I loved the very last shock twist which pulled some of the flashback plot together, however everything afterwards was disjointed and confusing and the ending fizzled out without an actual conclusion.

Overall Awakened has a brilliant premise and an interesting plot - it was just disappointing that the odd timelines, confusing ending and rambling chapters distracted from it. Thank you to NetGalley & Angry Robot for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Laura Elliott's "Awakened" presented such a fascinating and deeply unsettling premise right from the start – a world where the eradication of sleep has unleashed feral monstrosity – that I was hooked immediately. I found the concept, explored through the eyes of scientists trapped in the Tower of London grappling with the consequences of their creation, both incredibly compelling and chillingly relevant.

Elliott crafts a truly tense, surreal, almost fever-dream atmosphere throughout the novel. Reading it felt like being immersed in a waking nightmare, which I think speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the horror and the writing. Beyond just the immediate scares or the unsettling imagery (which is certainly present and unflinching), the book seemed to me to be a powerful exploration of contemporary anxieties – wrestling with the unforeseen consequences of technological ambition, the pressures of productivity, and profound questions about guilt, survival, and what fundamentally constitutes our humanity.

While the narrative is intense and doesn't shy away from the bleakness of its world, I felt it used this dark stage effectively to examine significant ethical quandaries. The situation facing Thea and the other survivors felt desperate and gripping.

Overall, "Awakened" struck me as a stunning and thought-provoking debut in the horror and speculative fiction space. It’s intelligent, atmospheric, deeply unsettling, and tackles genuinely big ideas within its compelling survival narrative. A truly memorable and impactful read that showcases what felt like a powerful new voice.

The premise of this novel is what drew me in, but unfortunately I’m going to DNF this at about the 25% mark because the writing and characterization never drew me in. I felt like the main character didn’t need to have this strange traumatic relationship to sleep or her relationships to have gotten to this point in the book, and felt like all the flashbacks drew me further and further from the story. I wanted to know what had happened and what will happen, but I never felt connected to the characters who were supposed to take me on the journey and eventually lost interest along the way. I’d be willing to give this book another try to see if perhaps I simply wasn’t in the right headspace for it, but for now I couldn’t continue when I only cared about the dystopian plot but nothing about the people living in it.

Thank you to Netgalley and Angry Robot for providing me this e-ARC.

Believing in an idea put forward in a science-fiction story is a matter of investment and putting aside preconceived ideas. Real life experience of a pandemic, the increasing evidence of climate change, lockdowns and some recent political events have certainly forced people to re-evaluate the possibility of a breakdown of society and adapting to life in a post-apocalyptic world. I initially found it difficult to put aside a sense of disbelief with the premise behind the disaster that has occurred in Awakened, but having seen how science, business and politics have twisted ideas of moral behaviour in the name of expedience, productivity and growth, it's perhaps not so far-fetched after all.

The principle behind Awakened is that society has significantly "changed", or to put it another way, completely broken down due to an ill-advised experiment with sleeplessness. Considering that the scientific knowledge of the benefits and necessity of sleep is already out there and beyond any dispute, and that the effects of sleep deprivation are well-known and experienced regularly by many unfortunate people and probably everyone at one time or another, it seems unlikely that any corporation would develop a drug to ensure that humans can exist and effectively double the productivity of their lives without having to waste downtime sleeping.

But that's exactly what has happened when the Orex Corporation received FDA approval - surely it could not have passed stringent health and safety requirements and thorough testing? - to roll out a programme where an inserted neuralchip allows users to go without sleep - at least for significant periods of time. It has been tested first on soldiers for the benefits it would undoubtedly offer the military, which is sort of half-way believable. Needless to say its wider use in the general public has all gone horribly wrong by the start of Awakened. It takes a little time to understand how and why, but the immediate situation we find ourselves in is with a small group of scientists holed up in the Tower of London at the behest of an 'Anonymous Billionaire'. They are currently conducting tests on a "subject", presumably in search of a cure or at least a better idea of what they are facing, because the scale of the problem in the world outside soon becomes clear.

As for why this wasn't tested thoroughly, well the rationale is actually a good one, that the tests were done on increased lengths of sleeplessness time, but considering what we already know about the sleep deprivation, no-one thought that anyone would ever consider total sleeplessness. There is however, as we have learned, always someone willing to do the unthinkable for their own benefit. "Human greed has always outstripped human needs", Thea observes at one point. The science and testing might appear be lacking rigour in the use of these neuralchips, but there is enough here to give benefit of doubt and consider instead the wider implications. Those implications as depicted here in Awakened are scary.

But we have to wait to really get any idea of the impact and scale of the problem of the Sleepless. Thea, one of the scientists in the Tower of London, is the narrator here and between philosophising on the nature of science and society and revisiting memories, is haunted by visions and hallucinations and dreams of her mother who was one of the first to fall to the sleeping sickness. Gradually we begin to piece together some clues about what is happening outside from an interview she conducts with one of the two new subjects who have turned up at the Tower. They are not typical of the feral population that now lives outside, but not human as we know it either. Could humans or the Sleepless possibly have evolved to a new stage?

Laura Elliott's writing - though her troubled narrator - rarely confronts events directly. While the reader might want to know more about the apocalyptic horrors in the outside world, the author avoids sensationalism and instead uses parallels, historical examples and Thea's own thoughts and experiences to probe at the underlying moral and social questions. At a certain stage in her interviews with Vladimir, you wonder who is really being examined, which one exhibits the truer response of human nature. There is not much in the way of conventional plot as such, no development and very little conventional character development. The other scientists are clearly defined but it's hard to really sympathise or relate to them, restricted as we are by Thea's growing unease with what is going on around her and her inability to relate to them.

The writing however is more revealing than we might think and it's not short on incident or shocks either. Little by little, we gain a gradual picture of the slow progress of a scientists' study and discovery (and not getting very far), but at the same time the novel expands outwards (or possibly inwards), gaining weight by the accumulation of detail, drawing you deeper into it, intriguing like a waking dream. Whether it resolves itself in a realistic or satisfactory way, or whether it succumbs itself to a withdrawal from any familiar reality will depend on the reader's expectations, but the direction of travel - in terms of how and why this happened - already indicates an outcome that we might just have to come to terms with based on what we know of humanity now and what to expect of it in the future.

Heavy, dense writing. Darkish horror. Not enough character development. Intelligently written but with a YA feel.

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This book had a really intriguing concept executed well. I really appreciated the nods to neuro and medical fields, it made the core concept much more believable.

The main character was very endearing and I was very invested in watching her navigate her conflicting emotions and responsibilities. I appreciated the way the author explored her relationships with the other characters too, I was expecting more of a romance subplot and was glad it didn't steer particularly hard in that direction!

My only piece of constructive criticism would be on pacing, the short chapters made it feel choppy at times. Although that may have been the intention, I sometimes found it hard to infer context (e.g. location, surroundings) in a given snippet.

The ending was very poetic in a satisfying way. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys realistic-ish dystopia sci-fi novels with strong character development.

This was a super interesting read! A good psychological horror book when you want to take a break from reading fantasy or romance! I enjoyed how the plot was laid out and had its own sort of pacing that we do not often see!

4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The premise of this book is strong. When the corporate world profits from investing in medical advancement, what could go wrong? Do people need to sleep? If corporate-backed scientists create a microchip for people’s brains, then they create an unstoppable military and a nonstop workforce.

So begins Awakened. It’s the aftermath of the apocalypse; the aftermath of the implanted chips that turned sleepless humans into monsters. In the effort to find a cure, scientists who created the disaster have barricaded themselves in the Tower of London.

While I like a dark, sci-fi, dystopian thriller, this end-of-the-world novel just didn’t do it for me. The writing style is dense, slow-paced, and heavy. However, there are some serious philosophical theories involved, so I am rating it 3.5.

Thank you to Angry Robot and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoy a dystopian and/or post apocalyptic story, and this tome weighs in heavy and hard with it all.

It's set in future London (which I love) in a dystopia of our making. Science has found ways to stop people sleeping, effectively to get more time out of humans. However, the by product of this is an insanity and a condition akin to vampyrism that has the expected effects on the world.

A thought provoking and grim read - in all the right ways. Highly recommended.

Awakened is an interesting exercise in genre and tone, all shrouded in gothic darkness and angst. It's science fiction written as horror fantasy, recalling the obvious giants of classic speculative fiction like Dracula and Frankenstein. On a more modern note, I was sometimes reminded of Simon Stålenhag's work. I found the emotional and thematic throughlines fascinating, as this dark, fantastical tone is intermittently interrupted by something that feels more fragile and naked, that being the protagonist's recollection of her mother. Thea's motivations and the commentary on ME/CFS really help pull the novel together, and I love the contrast between something so otherworldly and a real-life issue that grounds the novel in the reality that once was. It's a bold move, and one that makes the setting feel all the creepier. However, the philosophical back-and-forth scenes, which make up most of the novel, just feel generally flat and repetitive, so the novel threatened to lose me many times. The dialogue just sometimes has this YA-esque quality to it that doesn't grab me much, and as successful as the novel is at conveying its tone, a lot of that dialogue feels like it exists for tone alone, providing little in the way of character development until fairly late on.

Thank you to NetGally and Angry Robot for an ARC of this book.

“Sleep, those little slices of death, carving out ever-greater chunks of life until precious little of the waking world was left.”

This book had such an intriguing and unique concept, and I am always drawn to dystopian stories. I've never struggled with insomnia but I tend to have some weirdly dystopian dreams. Laura Elliot includes some profound thoughts on sleep that I had never considered before. However, I found myself more interested in the situation than the people involved.

Thea seemed somewhat like an unreliable narrator to me, her mind constantly bouncing between the present, past, and sleep. I found myself a bit bored by the flashbacks even though I wanted to know the cause of the situation. Furthermore, I was in Thea’s head the whole book yet I felt that I barely knew anything about her personality, and I knew close to nothing about most of the side characters. The plot felt kind of meandering and I don’t know what to make of the ending.

Overall, the book intelligently examines sleep and the effects taking sleep from people might have on civilization. I felt that the concept of this book was excellent, I just wish there was more exploration of the characters.

A grimly pleasant and pleasantly grim read for dystopian fiction fans. The main downside is the first person pov which made it harder to fully engage with the narrative but did also help with building tension. I would still definitely recommend this book! 3.5 stars!

n a world where capitalism has pushed human productivity to its limit, a group of scientists create a neural chip that works in harmony with the human brain.
Promoted as a cure for some of the most debilitating diseases and the pinnacle of productivity the chips are implanted in droves. Sleep is no longer the necessity it once was, instead it can be planned and controlled.

It’s revolutionary…until something goes wrong. A wave of violence washes over London as a few people override their chips and cause a catastrophic chain reaction.
Everyone with a chip implanted becomes sleepless. Human beings physically and mentally changed by the inability to rest.
We join Thea, our main character at the end of the world. One of the scientists who had a hand in ending the world working ruthlessly to find a cure; for the world, for her mother, to assuage her guilt.
Set in the Tower of London, in a self sustaining community, there are some really strong observations of the outside world that recur throughout but most of the narrative is internal.
Thea’s narration switches between diary like entries, internal monologue and scientific observations. Our narrator is unreliable and the reader has to piece together the truth as Thea searches for it.
Flitting between the past and the present, dreams and nightmares, the prose switches from poetic and haunting, to scientific and clinical.

There’s some zombie and vampire inspiration, but the sleepless are relatively sparse throughout the book. We only catch glimpses of the end of the world. The Sleepless are a terrifying unknown that we only really witness in a controlled environment.
A new discovery ushers in hope for a cure, but again mistakes are made in the name of science and progress.

This book is an introspective exploration of what it means to be human. How do we define ourselves and others. What do you have to lose before you become less than human? Where do you draw the line? Is natural, cruel behaviour worse than conscious, optional brutality. What is an acceptable cost for progress ?

Awakened also examines our medical system, our society, illness, our need for scientific progress and what’s ignored in this endeavour, chronic fatigue syndrome, agency and consent.
It calls attention to the apathy and otherness assigned to anyone who is different.

The characters are difficult to place in the beginning, but all feel authentic and flawed in a very human way.
Thea is haunted by the past, present and future. As Thea’s understanding of herself and the world dissolves its reflected in her entries and the final chapters of the book. There are some gut wrenching twists. Over all a really enjoyable read.

A bunch of scientists hole up in a tower after playing too much God and inventing vampires. Main character Thea feels super guilty about this because all she was trying to do was cure her chronically ill mother. When a couple of vampires who are still kind of human turn up on their doorstep in search of shelter, the scientists let them in and interview the only verbal one within an inch of his life. They call him Vladimir, and he goes along with it because he can take a joke. This is not a romance novel, but Vladimir is very alluring and could easily carry his own Twilight series. Thea is a hot mess, but so would I be if I was living in I Am Legend with no cute dog to make up for it. Alex is the kind of person who secretly thinks Andrew Tate has a point. The writing is poetic and stunning.
good for fans of: dystopian existential dread, body horror, the prison season of The Walking Dead, vampires with excellent table manners, goats