Samantha Harvey - The Shapeless Unease: Resolve A Year of Not Sleeping via Hard Exercise

Samantha Harvey is the author of The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief and The Western Wind. She appeared on the longlists for the Baileys Prize and the Man Booker, and the shortlists of the James Tait Black Award, the Orange Prize, the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize. The Wilderness won the Betty Trask Award in 2009. She is a tutor on the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

How can a book about a sensual deprivation be so sensuous and so full? Gritty with particulars, concrete and substantial even when it is most philosophical and far-reaching. I loved reading it before I fell asleep every night it seemed to give my sleep resonance and poetry. What a beautiful book. Tessa Hadley

The Shapeless Unease captures the essence of fractious emotions anxiety, fear, grief, rage in prose so elegant, so luminous, it practically shines from the page. Harvey is a hugely talented writer, and this is a book to relish. Sarah Waters

What a spectacularly good book. It is so controlled and yet so wild. One of the best books Ive read about writing. One of the best books Ive read about swimming. One of the best books Ive read about mourning. And easily one of the truest and best books Ive read about what its like to be alive now, in this country. Max Porter

This book felt enormous to me, mercurial, devastating, seeming to grapple with the nature of everything in a manner so compelling it is impossible not to be swept along. A book to return to again and again. Daisy Johnson

I am still shuddering, almost, from the beautiful, beautiful writing and its broken, angry, vibrant demand a dare almost to accept life, and brave it, with all it brings. Cynan Jones

A small miracle of a book. Reading it feels like its own kind of lucid dream You would imagine a book written in such circumstances would have a hazy quality, but in fact its clarity of expression is startling. Sam Harvey is the most exceptionally gifted of authors, and here she demonstrates that she can literally do anything. Nathan Filer

Its funny, sad, wry, always worrying away at the mystery of sleep and its absence and finding endless new angles so that the whole has something of the quality of those waking dreams that haunt the insomniac and are her private country. Andrew Miller

Also by Samantha Harvey

The Wilderness

All is Song

Dear Thief

The Western Wind

For all those awake in the night.

And for those Ive woken up; Im sorry.

Midnight:

Into bed and lie down. Head goes on pillow.

Out of bed; superstitiously plucking the strewn clothes from the floor to fold them into rough bundles and put them away one of countless little routines undertaken to forfend a sleepless night. One of countless little routines forcibly dismissed as superstition, in the superstition that superstitious acts will only shorten the odds of sleep but unignorable in the end. Needs must. The attaining of sleep long ago left the realm of natural act and entered that of black magic.

Back into bed and read, a collection of William Trevor short stories. Theres sleepiness soon, like something calling from around the corner. Theres a sharp, stinging pain at the crown of my head; the scalp is being stitched with embroidery needles. The lamp is shut off and the room is more or less dark. An odd creak issues from who knows where.

The heart starts up its thrup-thrup-thrup, a tripping percussion in a chest that now fills with breath. Breathe, breathe. And with the light out, here they come, all of them, the holy and the horrifying; here they are.

In the medieval Ars moriendi the deathbed of a man is crowded with them, saints and demons, each vying for his soul. The demons try to tempt him into despair theres something monkey-like with horns and a mans face on its belly, holding a dagger; something dog-like with a single antler and a perverse grin, a luring finger; a ram-headed demon looking over his shoulder; a satyr-like being with a hooked nose, licking its lips. Come with us into death, they say. Forsake your faith and come with us.

And then a picture of the same man, the satyr fallen at his bedside, the leg of another demon that has scrambled in fear under the bed. Mary Magdalene and St Peter stand by his pillow, St Peter holding the key to heaven. Behind them, Jesus is crucified, his head slumped backwards over the horizontal strut of the cross, and on the headboard of the bed is the rooster of Peters redemption, the rooster whose crow awoke him from his denial of Christ and caused him to repent. Come with us, say the rooster, St Peter, the Christ here is your restoration, come with us to the kingdom of heaven.

I close my eyes and try to keep hold of that sleepiness, whose call is still there behind the hearts syncopation. The heart a tough lump of meat, flooded with fear. Fifty minutes pass; its almost one. Usually if sleep is going to come it would have come by now; and if it hasnt come by now, the probability is no sleep at all. Sweat, the first inkling of panic like a storm heard across a distant plain, just the vaguest muffled thunder. Still time to sleep; the storm might yet not come.