A strange and tender novel from Costa-shortlisted author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan: a sixteen-year-old girl watches her parents' marriage implode and her family shatter from a surreal viewpoint.

'That summer, my mind separated from my body as completely as an egg cracked from its shell. The splitting began in those hazy days just after exams were done when everything should have been easy.'

When she is sixteen, Kit suffers a summer of sleeplessness that isn't quite what it seems; her body lies in bed while she wanders through her family home, the streets of her run-down seaside town and into the houses of friends and strangers. Unseen and unheard, she witnesses her parents and their deteriorating relationship in a painful new way. Her home thrums with quiet violence that she can no longer ignore. With this secret knowledge it becomes impossible not to react and a single word soon changes everything.

Intimate, tense and exquisitely observed, The Sleep Watcher is a moving portrait of family, danger and guilt, captured through the strange summer heat of adolescence.