
All Anna wants is to be able to sleep. But crushing insomnia, terrifying night terrors and memories of that terrible night are making it impossible. If only she didn’t feel so guilty…
To escape her past, Anna takes a job at a hotel on the remote Scottish island of Rum, but when seven guests join her, what started as a retreat from the world turns into a deadly nightmare.
Each of the guests have a secret but one of them is lying – about who they are and why they’re on the island. There’s a murderer staying in the Bay View hotel. And they’ve set their sights on Anna.
Seven strangers. Seven secrets. One deadly lie.
Someone’s going to sleep and never wake up…
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Hi and welcome to my audiobook review of Sleep! Many thanks to Avon Books UK for the opportunity and the download code!
If you’re a regular here, you’ll know I love audiobooks, so when I got offered a spot on this tour, I jumped at the chance to listen to Sleep! Even though I’d already bought (but not yet read) the eBook…
Sleep is the story of Anna. When driving home from a work convention, she’s tired and irritable and distracted for a second by one of her colleagues in the backseat and so she doesn’t see the lorry about to hit her car. She wakes up in hospital, she’s fine, but her colleague Mo has lost the use of his legs and two other colleagues have died. She’s not to blame, yet guilt weighs her down. Someone leaving her strange notes, quoting Shakespeare, telling her to sleep, in combination with her relationship ending, is the final straw and Anna decides to make a clean break with everything and everyone in moving to the island of Rum, where she’ll be working in a hotel. She’s convinced that a change of job and scenery will be just the thing to allow her to move on, to finally relax, to get away from her memories, her guilt, the creep who’s been leaving her notes. She never expected said creep to follow her all the way to Rum…
Before long, the first message shows up. There are seven guests at the hotel, and Anna is convinced that one of them wants her to sleep forever. But who? When a storm breaks out and the weather is so ghastly no one can venture outside, things go downhill fast and the locked room trope is in full swing. Ah locked rooms 😍 They’ve been done before but I never seem to tire of them, I love them in all shapes and sizes, especially when they’re done right, which was absolutely the case here. Not that I had expected anything less of C.L. Taylor, as I’ve loved all her books, I’ve been a fan since reading The Lie and she’s been on my auto-buy list ever since.
The story is told mostly from Anna’s perspective in the first person, but we also learn parts of it through various other characters in the third person, and there small In Memoriam texts too. With regards to those bits, no they did not make sense to me at all in the beginning, but they sure did at the end!
The narrator, Clare Corbett, did an outstanding job. I’ve listened to Clare before, and she’s really at the top of her game with Sleep. She has a beautiful voice and does all the accents and various voices flawlessly, including the male Scottish hotel owner. Because of the clear structure of the novel, each chapter announcing who we’ll be hearing from, it’s very easy to follow and I never got confused. A delight to listen to!
I thoroughly enjoyed Sleep from start to wicked finale! It’s a clever, twisty, suspenseful and tense psychological thriller that I will happily recommend in whatever format to all lovers of the genre, fans of the locked room trope and any reader looking for an excellent page-turner to get lost in!
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Fab review! I loved it too, Clare Corbett was amazing!
Thanks Nicki ? She absolutely was!
Fab review! I think I’m just going to give up on my preorder ever being shipped and read the ebook instead… I don’t think I can resist Sleep much longer! The premise sounds absolutely fantastic. xx
It’s great! Will BD reimburse you? x
I haven’t tried yet, but I suppose? I keep hoping they will send it some time in the future, probably after I cave in and read my e-copy. xD
If I remember correctly, Drew had the same problem with The Whisper Man I think it was.
Oh yes I do remember that! I’ve been waiting since April, then May though. xD