Insomnia: A Novel

So stressful! But a fun time.

Can't sleep, going crazy, you will never believe the twists and turns.

There is nothing better than a thriller that has a main character scared of something you yourself have struggled with.

Emma is within days of turning 40 - the age where her mother finally snapped and went insane. Emma's mother always told her she would be just like her and now that 40 is knocking, Emma is feeling very anxious - enough to find herself unable to sleep. Insomnia becomes the least of her worries as events are set into motion that sends Emma into a spiral.

Some might read this and think that it's just not plausible for one person's life to get so out of control so fast. I'm telling you it is absolutely believable - come let me tell you about MY life sometime. LOL Which is probably why this book had me chewing my nails and turning page after page after page. While I was reading it, I unfortunately got really sick and was placed on steroids, which kept ME from sleeping, so I really related to Emma's suffering from insomnia. The exhaustion, the brain fog, not being able to remember what you did - I was right there with her.

Now, I will say I do wish the author had taken a different route as far as the big mystery of what all was happening (or not happening). The nature of it, now that IS something I love usually, but I feel if it had not been used in this one, it would have been better. That's just my personal opinion - I still really enjoyed the book and will definitely get my hands on more Sarah Pinborough!

Bestselling author Sarah Pinborough says her inspiration for Insomnia was a desire to explore sleepless nights that often prove frightening and the resultant paranoia. The story opens twelve days before Emma Averell's fortieth birthday. Emma, a divorce attorney, awakens at 1:13 a.m., convinced that someone is in the home she shares with her stay-at-home husband, Robert, and their children, five-year-old Will and Chloe, who is seventeen. After she checks on the children and satisfies herself that nothing is amiss, she returns to bed and tries to go back to sleep. By 3:00 a.m., she is checking her emails and contemplating her schedule for the day. She is on track to become a partner at her firm and knows that without sleep she is facing a long, grueling day. Yoga breathing brings no relief and she drags herself through the workday, in the midst of which she receives a telephone call from her older sister, Phoebe, summoning her to the hospital. When she arrives, she finds that Phoebe, three years her elder, has tricked her, knowing that she would not have come if she'd realized it was in response to their seventy-five-year-old mother's injury. It seems she smashed her head against a mirror during the night and sustained a cerebral hematoma which is life-threatening. And she did it at 1:13 a.m. Emma made clear long ago that she never wanted to see their mother, who has spent years in a secure unit housing mental patients who are too ill to be imprisoned, again. But Phoebe reveals that she has been visiting their catatonic mother over the prior few months, maintaining that the visits were recommended as a way of healing.

Just before Phoebe's own fortieth birthday, the sisters lost contact when Phoebe essentially vanished. Now her reappearance is dredging up memories for Emma, who has told her colleagues, friends, and family that their mother is dead. When Emma met Robert, she lied to him about her family history -- and Phoebe backed up the story. "I don't want my mother's story to be any part of my life," Emma explains in the first-person narrative Pinborough employs to tell her compelling story. As she returns to her office, Emma is confronted by the crazed spouse of one of her clients, and at the end of the day finds her car has been keyed and a vile note left on the windshield. It's only the first of a series of very bad days for Emma as her fortieth birthday looms. Suddenly, anything that can go wrong, does. And Emma's life begins quickly unraveling.

With each passing day, Emma's inability to sleep becomes more pronounced, and she desperately tries to maintain her sanity as her career and family begin slipping away from her. But the line between reality and fantasy grows increasingly blurred as she becomes more and more sleep-deprived, her behavior increasingly erratic and irrational. Indeed, many of her actions are outside the realm of plausibility for an educated, professional woman, especially when she fails to heed the precise advice she would render to her clients. She begins experiencing blackouts and finds herself the prime suspect in a murder investigation. She knows that she could not have committed the crime . . . doesn't she?

As a girl, her mother called Emma the "mad child," warning her that she inherited "bad blood" that ran in their family. So Emma has always feared that she would turn out to be like her mother. "How long before that night, her fortieth birthday, did my mother stop sleeping?" she wonders. Unlike Phoebe, Emma cannot remember a time when their mother wasn't mad. Her mother locked her in a cupboard and left her there for hours at a time. Emma was the one who found their mother in the act of harming Phoebe, as a result of which the sisters were placed in foster care and their mother was permanently institutionalized. She consults a doctor who explains that rather than trying to forget her mother, relief might be found by trying to understand her. Emma accepts the wisdom in that approach, but in her panicked state, finds herself engaging in compulsive behaviors akin to her mother's and suspects that Phoebe has come back into her life with a malicious motive. Are Phoebe and Robert plotting against her? Are they gaslighting her? And is someone else involved in a sinister plot against her? She is devoted to her children and knows that she could never harm them. Doesn't she? Sleep-deprivation leads her to fear that she might actually hurt them. She questions her own judgment and her hard-earned career implodes. And in the midst of her ongoing crisis, she befriends a nurse, Caroline, who kindly returns her wallet after it is stolen by a gang of boys. Caroline's viewpoint is provided via interspersed chapters related in her voice. But is the whole encounter a set-up related to secrets Emma has yet to discover? On top of everything else, Emma's seventeen-year-old daughter is rebelling and acting out in a deeply concerning, self-destructive fashion. Can she save her?

For Emma, the life she dreamed about and carefully constructed unexpectedly falls apart, and she finds herself literally fighting to hang on. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Emma is careening closer and closer toward a catastrophe from which she will never be able to recover. Her young son, Will, who has taken to drawing the same picture over and over, unwittingly provides some of the most damning evidence that she is indeed losing her grip on reality and may be a danger to her family, as well as herself.

Pinborough expertly ramps up the dramatic tension with each unsettling event in Emma's life while her birthday draws nearer, accelerating the story's pace as Emma's descent into complete madness seems all but assured. In fact, the story itself appears to be careening out of control, as well, but it becomes apparent that is by design. At that juncture, Pinborough begins revealing what has actually been happening to Emma and why. "I have been so worried about repeating the past, but what if I've been looking at it all the wrong way around?" Emma ponders. Having found a key piece of evidence, she is able to piece together what she has been experiencing. But has she figured it out in time?

Pinborough deftly keeps readers guessing until the very end. In fact, exactly as Emma's whole life feels off-kilter, readers will experience the same sensation while trying to solve the mystery, to no avail. It is a thoroughly puzzling, indeed unsettling, but engaging and inventive thriller. Once all is revealed, the cleverness of Pinborough's plot and use of an other-worldly aspect is displayed. The story's conclusion is surprisingly satisfying and thought-provoking. To what extent does the past inform the future? Is it ever possible to fully overcome childhood trauma? What about the importance and impact of the picture that Will drew incessantly?

Perhaps Emma is right, after all, when she says, "There are some things you can't try to understand. You'd go mad trying."

Thanks to Scene of the Crime (via NetGalley) for an Advance Reader's Copy of the book.

I watched the Netflix Series 'Behind Her Eyes' and loved the suspense and supernatural themes. So, when I saw that Sarah Pinborough wrote Insomnia I knew that I had to read it!

The story itself reminded me of 'Behind Her Eyes' and the movie 'Hereditary'. You have a mother as the main character who is doing everything she can to find out about her estranged mother's life as she tries to uncover family secrets to protect her family. But, is she protecting her family from the impending danger, or is she the danger her family needs protecting from?

The whole story you are in just as much disbelief as the main character...she doesn't know if she is awake or asleep, if she is sane or going mad like her mother, and as things twist and turn deeper into the story a mind-bending and time-bending twist is added!

This will be hard to tip for my favorite thriller of 2022! Thank you for the ARC!