The House of Sleep - Softcover

The House of Sleep is an intricate cat's cradle of a novel, full of both sly satire and oblique meditations on the interstices of love, sleep, memory, and dreams. The setting is Ashdown, a wind-swept old house by the sea that once provided university housing and now is home to a clinic for sleep disorders. During the early 1980s, a group of students meet here, united by little other than a curious preoccupation with sleep. They include Sarah, a narcoleptic who has trouble distinguishing her intensely vivid dreams from reality; her first boyfriend, the fussy egomaniac Gregory, who gets his kicks from pressing his fingers on Sarah's closed eyes; Terry, a film buff who sleeps at least 14 hours a day, dreaming blissful dreams he can never quite remember; and the sensitive Robert, who loves Sarah enough to do anything at all in order to have her. By a series of startling coincidences, the four are drawn back to Ashdown 12 years later, setting into motion a plot so carefully contrived it makes most thrillers look spare and impressionistic. Like a dream, The House of Sleep resonates with repeated images, phrases, even passages; here they serve as narrative glue for a complicated story that moves backward and forward in time and in and out of different points of view. The result is sometimes puzzling, always absorbing, and often very funny indeed.

"Intricately plotted and ingeniously constructed. . . . A deft satire . . . a strange and poignant love story." --The Wall Street Journal

"Often disconcerting, sometimes moving, frequently funny. . . . Coe eviscerates the bottom-liners with hilarious bare-toothed ferocity." --The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Jonathan Coe has written a witty, engaging romance that reinvigorates the old saw that life is a dream."

--The New York Times Book Review

"An epic farce fueled by romance and satire. . . . It is also a hilarious and deeply touching tale. . . .Love, tenderness, affection: The House of Sleep glows with these qualities, and exalts them." --San Francisco Chronicle