The Dreamers
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4.1 • 29 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A strange illness induces sleep and heightens dreams in an isolated college town, transforming the lives of ordinary people, in this mesmerizing novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Miracles.
A college girl tells her friends that she's feeling strangely tired. The next morning, when they find her in bed, she is still breathing--but she won't wake up.
Within a few days, another student, down the hallway, won't wake up.
As the sleeping sickness spreads, the town is turned upside down. We meet Ben and Annie, a young couple determined to keep their newborn baby safe; Sara and Libby, whose survivalist father has long prepared for disaster; Mei and Matthew, and other college students. A quarantine is established, the national guard is summoned. Yet, those who have fallen asleep are showing unusual patterns of brain activity. More than has ever been recorded in any brain--asleep or awake. They are dreaming--but of what?
With gorgeous prose and heart-stopping emotion, The Dreamers startles and provokes about the possibilities contained within a human life, when we are awake and, perhaps even more, when we are dreaming.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A freshman at a small California college falls asleep and can’t be roused. Soon, more of her classmates—and an ever-increasing number of townspeople and aid workers—are similarly afflicted: suspended in a dream state and kept alive via feeding tubes. We devoured Karen Thompson Walker’s novel, which shifts from intimate snapshots of the lives disrupted by the so-called Santa Lora Virus to sharp insights into the evolution of a public health crisis. The Dreamers raises compelling questions about memory, love, time, and the tension between individual bonds and the greater good.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Walker's richly imaginative and quietly devastating second novel (after The Age of Miracles) begins in a college dorm in an isolated town in the hills of Southern California, where a freshman thinks she is coming down with the flu. In fact, she has a mysterious disease that causes its victims to fall into a deep, dream-laden sleep from which they cannot be woken, and which sometimes leads to death. The disease spreads slowly at first, then more rapidly, and soon the whole town is under a quarantine. The perspective moves smoothly in and out of the minds of several of the college students and town residents, drawing back to look at the entire situation from a detached but compassionate point of view and then plunging back into the minds of those attempting to deal with the escalating problems. Among the characters are Mei, a lonely college freshman; 12-year-old Sara, who copes with an unhinged survivalist father; Sara's neighbors, a faculty couple with a newborn baby; and aging biology professor Nathaniel. As the majority of the people of the town fall victim to the disease, neuropsychiatrist Catherine Cohen, separated from her family by the quarantine, tries desperately to find its cause, until arson at a library that's being used as a makeshift hospital has unintended results on the state of some of the dreamers. The relatively large number of central characters makes it likely that some will succumb to the disease, upping the suspense of the story. Walker jolts the narrative with surprising twists, ensuring it keeps its energy until the end. This is a skillful, complex, and thoroughly satisfying novel about a community in peril.
