ONE OF “THE BEST SUMMER READS OF 2025” – OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB ONE OF REAL SIMPLE 'S BEST BOOKS OF
2025 “Incredibly moving." – Ann Patchett “Propulsive and funny and heartbreaking.” —J.
Courtney Sullivan "An exceptionally moving novel. Jones takes her cues from writers like John
Cheever Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf."— The New York Times "Profoundly beautiful."— NPR
From a dazzling new talent the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with
the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the big house where she
was raised. Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born
into and the one she has made. Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her
family’s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is
a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend
but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as
she is loving and her father and brother assume familiar if uncomfortable models of
masculinity. Then late one summer everything changes. After a series of confusing
transgressions the simple pleasures of girlhood slip away. Twenty-five years later
Margaret hides under her parents’ bed waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of
hide and seek. She’s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent while discovering
the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush punched
out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters and a daughter to her mother she
must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present what it means to
keep a child safe and how much of our lives are our own alone. Warm and generous
unflinchingly human and ultimately joyful and empowering SLEEP is about the cycles of
motherhood and childhood the cost of secrets and the burden of love and what’s on the other
side of silence: the world rich in possibility.
