Sleeper's Wake | Granta

  • Published: 02/02/2012
  • ISBN: 9781847086594
  • Granta Books
  • 192 pages

Sleeper’s Wake

Alistair Morgan

Forty-six-year-old John Wraith regains consciousness after a car accident to learn that his wife and five-year-old daughter died in the same incident. What is all the more traumatic for him is that he was driving the car. At the urging of his sister, John decides to recuperate in her holiday chalet in Nature’s Valley, on the South African coast. It is winter and Nature’s Valley is largely deserted – except for a disturbed young woman of seventeen called Jackie, her equally strange brother and her father, who is a born-again Christian. John’s uneasy yet intense involvement with this trio, particularly with Jackie, to whom he is sexually attracted, provides the novel with its driving narrative and extraordinary, shocking denouement. Written in lucid, often beautiful prose, Sleeper’s Wake is a haunting study of man at his most naked and vulnerable.

Not in a very long time have I read something that gripped me so intensely ... Quite a tour de force ... I often felt like scribbling "Bravo!" in the margin

André Brink

Alistair Morgan grips the reader from the very first line ... Literary fiction with the pace of a thriller, this outstanding first novel marks the arrival of an exciting new writer

Irish Examiner

A serious, harrowing read ... Morgan evokes the intensity of the situation brilliantly, making Sleeper's Wake a sombre but gripping experience

Herald

The Author

Alistair Morgan was born in Johannesburg in 1971. Two of his short stories have been published in the Paris Review, one of which was nominated for a National Magazine Award and also included in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2009. He lives in Cape Town.

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