I enjoyed this, both interesting and worrying in equal measure with loads going on.

Thank you NetGalley for my complimentary copy in return for my honest review.

I really enjoyed this book. Interesting subject and slightly terrifying! Full of great twists and turns, found it hard to put down: a great read!

This is one of those books that you read and then instantly tell everyone you know that they have to read it

There the irony that a book about an insomniac who manages to sleep kept me away wasnt lost on me - but its just so good - Thea is easy to like and become engaged with that you just want her to be okay.

Debut novel Sleepless by Louise Mumford is a a non traditional gripping psychological thriller laced with elements of science fiction providing a unique spin on a traditional genre.
Our main character - Thea Mackenzie has had insomnia for as long as she can rememberand the book centres around her desperation to try anythingeven a creepy sleep trial on a remote item that screams alarm bells.
After crashing her car and recieving an add ”Morpheus. Dream your way to a better you - one sleep at a time,” (Serious matrix vibes here) the enticemnet of "reprgramming hte brain to get better sleep" is too good to be true, throw in the fact they'll pay her for hte six week trial and her suitcase is packed. .Alas as predicted all is not what it seems and she soon begins to notice strange and disturbing things happening around her:

Im a big fan of dystopian thrillers and this really ticked the box for me. Creepy, intesne and an expert portrayl of insomnia and exhasution made this a gripping and atmospheric read. A whopping 4 stars from me.

This was a very disturbing but good read.

Thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish and could not get enough of.

This is a must read for anyone who enjoys a good thriller!!
Absolutely loved the characters, the plot, the tension -  impossible to put it down.
Certainly recommended!

Sleepless cured my insomnia. I attempted to read this book multiple times, and always et it down. Love a good dystopian story, but this story was just emotionally void. The characters unrelatable, uninteresting, and forgettable.

The book was great, interesting characters, fast changing and twisting plot- exactly what I love! I would recommend this book to my friends and family!

As someone who is up at 3am reading a psychological thriller when I can’t sleep, I thought this was the perfect book to read in the quiet of night. Thea is an insomniac but I don’t feel I am. Thea is in a sleep trial and is finally able to sleep for hours at a time and feels relieved. Good for Thea. Im still awake and the book is beginning to read as a nightmare. Is someone controlling Thea in her sleep. Now I need to keep going until the end. Done and stunned. Can’t sleep now. Too agitated by this thriller. Fills my head. Maybe I should look for a sleep study in my area? After this book, I will stay awake as long as I can.

A dystopian debut that delights. It’s about insomnia and relationships and dreams. I am an insomniac and it’s a tough one. But reading helps. Devoured this. Didn’t help my insomnia as it’s a really good read. Can’t wait to read her next book.

This is a really interesting idea - an insomniac, Thea, heads to a specialist experimental sleep clinic on an island in the hope that they will help her to sleep again.

However, the experiement is not as it seems and the reader is pushed along on a well paced thriller as Thea tries to work out what is going on and how she will survive.

Loses a star simply becuase there is a concept of a face in a window which the writer clearly needs to draw upon.... and so on numerous occassions clunkily throws it into text until finally the plot pulls together.

Thanks for NetGalley for the ARC in return for an honest review :-)

Disclaimer: I received a free digital ARC (Advanced Reading Copy) of this book from NetGalley and the publisher. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Description

Thea is an insomniac who hasn't been able to sleep throughout the night for years. In her desperation to find some kind of therapy that helps her to sleep, she comes across a study that promises to help people with sleeping issues. She goes through the application process, and when she gets accepted, she goes on a retreat on a remote island. There she meets dozens of other people with different sleeping disorders, and she thinks she will finally find a solution to hers... and after a few days, she does. She goes to sleep and she can do it for longer than she has for years. And she wakes up rested and feeling great.

But something is wrong. The people in the study are not allowed to use the internet, and they can only call their family once a day. The leaders of the story are also encouraging cultish behavior, and they even put tracker devices on everyone's heads to "track" their sleeping patterns. It just doesn't feel right, and then Thea realizes that the leaders are hiding things from everyone, and she takes on the mission to find out what it is.

Review

This book looked promising, and I was extremely eager to start it. However, it did not meet my expectations, and I ended up skimming the last few chapters.

The story is told from Thea's POV, and she discusses her sleeping disorder and the many ways she has tried to fix it. She has tried medication and countless sleeping therapy devices, but she has not been successful. So once she learns about this new study that promises to help her, she does everything she can to get in it.

The plot is interesting at first. I enjoyed reading about Thea's struggles and learning about her disorder. I also enjoyed reading the application processes and pointing out all of the red flags, so I was expecting to love the plot once they arrive on the island. Unfortunately, once they are in the retreat, the plot unravels terribly. For a few chapters, I thought this would go from a thriller to a horror story, and I was quite confused about how the story was developing. It went from a normal thriller to horror to paranormal to back to thriller in the span of two chapters. It goes from strong storytelling to truly boring and slow.

And the characters are also written badly. Besides Thea and Moses, we don't learn anything valuable from other characters. At one point, I was confused about sleeping disorders because there are several characters but we don't learn anything about them. It was frustrating.

I ended up skimming a lot of the last part of the book, and barely remember anything noteworthy from the story at all.

I loved the storyline for this book and thought the idea was really unusual and clever. Insomniac Thea resolves to deal with her sleeplessness after it causes her to crash her car. She responds to an advert claiming to improve her sleep. Once accepted onto the course she agrees to be taken to a remote island where she has to hand in her mobile phone leaving her with no way of contacting the outside world. Then it all takes a sinister turn as Thea realises all is not what it seems. She then has to find a way to get off the island and to get help. I struggled to differentiate between some of the male characters and got a bit muddled in places as so much seemed to be happening at once. I enjoyed the first part of the book the most. I listened to this as an audio book and enjoyed the narration. Thank you to Louise Mumford, Net Galley and Harper Collins UK Audio for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

We’ve all had a good moan after a sleepless night…. Imagine every night was like that and you still had to function! I’m not talking about only getting four hours I’m talking lying awake desperately pleading with sleep to take you. Then all of a sudden there’s light at the end of the tunnel, someone has the cure!
But it’s not all as it seems and Thea starts to see beneath the shiny glossy exterior to the darker underbelly.
I absolutely loved the story, the little quips and one liners tickled my funny bone and were right on my level! The characters were so well written. When I think of this book it will forever conjure up an image of a matriarchal mother with a proper set hair do and dressed in a lady parts printed scarf!
Still need to know more about the barefoot man… aspire…. Morpheus… was it stopped?

Oh my goodness I did not see that coming.

This started off as an easy read and I was engrossed from the get go, and then when it developed in to a spooky thriller, my adrenalin did not let up and I could not put this down.

Thea enters a programme to help with her insomnia, things start to feel pretty strange and she isn't really sure what she has signed up for.
Things take a turn for the worse when her friend gets injured very mysteriously and she let's her close friends in on what she thinks is going on.

When u get this far into the book, you will not be able to put this down, this is a combination of Black Mirror and The Hunger Games. Will Thea be able to get off the island and away from this cult as her mother called it. Who should she trust? Who is her real friend?

Trigger warnings - quite graphic information on the deaths of certain characters, suicide mentions.

Thank you to #netgalley for this ARC.
I'm off to buy this in paperback.

This was an interesting concept and enjoyable although I felt predictable storyline . Insomnia was explained really well and I felt I learnt from the story .

This took me a little time to get my head around the unusual concept; Thea applied to take part in a sleep trial to help her Insomnia, the trial appeared normal to begin with but, then took on a more bizarre turn. At times things got a little gruesome as candidates in the trial seemed to be brain-washed and their minds played tricks on them. I wasn’t expecting this and it added a creepy and slightly scary element to the story!

Thea struck me as quite an introverted individual, she suffers from Insomnia she’s keen to take part in a trial advertised to help with this. Her mother on the other hand is quite a vocal character; leader of The menopausal army, she leads a feminism crusade and her reputation precedes her. I enjoyed her interactions and found her a very humorous character. She’s very protective and supportive of Thea and I found their relationship endearing.

The trial location struck me as being like a rehab clinic with limited contact with the outside world and no permitted use of mobile phones; it is quite an uncomfortable environment and I found the scenes here both sinister and intriguing. Sleep deprived people are always dangerous when pushed to a limit and the trial camp was a tense and eerie setting.

I enjoyed this and found it an unusual and unsettling read! If you are looking for something a little bit different from a typical thriller then give this a try.

I am always on the look-out for promising thrillers by emerging writers, so was happy to receive a free ARC from the publishers and NetGalley in exchange for this honest and unbiased review. For this reason, I persevered with the book. It starts promising enough, with a storyline built around Thea, an incurable insomniac, who is delighted to be invited to join a clinical trial for a company by the name of Morpheus. Some of the ensuing passages are either wildly unbelievable (what clinic trial, for example, would take place on a remote, hard-to-read island?) or overwritten, with too much description. None of the ancillary characters have as much emotional depth as Thea, and for this reason, I did not enjoy this novel as much as I thought I would.

Having read the author’s previous book, Dear Child, I had high hopes for Sleepless by Louise Mumford. After getting about a third of the way through, I just couldn’t get into it as the storyline is, for me, not plausible. Unfortunately I didn’t finish it which is unusual for me. Possibly it’s just not a good fit for me.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

A really great read. A great psychological thriller with lots of twists and the story really hooks you in. Well written characters too. Highly recommended.

This is a totally different type of book that I would normally go for but totally brilliant nonetheless! It is quite dark and sometimes violent - very ‘Black Mirror’ish and somewhat disturbing. The concept is brilliant and I could really see it happening..
A must read!