Awake Awake
the new novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of Elmet
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Awake Awake
Narrated by:
Arabella Arnott
Buy Now for £17.94
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Narrated by:
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Arabella Arnott
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By:
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Fiona Mozley
Summary
What if you can no longer trust your memories?
Mary is struggling with her memory. She does not have too few recollections but too many, including some that are downright absurd. She has many memories of her childhood: going to parties and on school trips, walks with her father and family dinners. She remembers world events too: the falling of the Twin Towers and the Iraq War. But the most concerning memories she has are about her Jewish grandfather and his role in the death of Adolf Hitler. She feels sure - almost completely sure - that what she has been told can't be true, that she must have imagined the whole thing. But there is a doubt.
To decipher fact from fiction, Mary goes back over her life, sorting through her childhood and adolescence with her three friends in York, through an adulthood accustomed to tragedy. Guided by her family and friends, Mary attempts to figure out what is real, both in history and her own life, all the while wondering if her mind has conjured everything.
'A unique, visionary novel about the toll of memory and the power and fragility of the human heart and mind. Fiona Mozley gives a masterclass in the novel form' Kim Sherwood, author of Testament©2026 Fiona Mozley
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Critic reviews
On the one hand, a clarion call - a clear-eyed view of contemporary moral and political failure in the UK - and on the other, an assembly of engrossing philosophical and metaphysical engagements with the nature of memory . . . a fascinating read
Confident and unsettling . . . Awake Awake deserves a place alongside Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings and Claire Messud's The Burning Girl as an elegiac reflection on the intensity of teenage friendship, along with the almost unbearable pain that results when such a bond is severed
An incredible achievement, a story of friendship, memory, loss, and moral duty unlike any I've read before . . . every character and storyline could be its own novel and yet they come together so thunderously and convincingly . . . It blew me away
A unique, visionary novel about the toll of memory and the power and fragility of the human heart and mind. Fiona Mozley gives a masterclass in the novel form, showing just how much room for invention we still have. I couldn't put it down
A warm, kindly and beautifully written novel about growing up in a family and in history, about inconvenient memory and haunted repression
A stunning jewel of a novel. In crisply evoked scenes, Mozley brings to life all the peril and appetite of childhood friendship, set against the changing political climate of the early twenty-first century. It is a book in which the past lives on in the present, in which history itself proves skittish and irreducible. It is, finally, a gorgeous testament to the fierce bonds that connect us when we are young and the memories that shape not only who we were once, but who we become
All the ingredients are present for a rich and compelling novel
Introspective and intelligent
A fascinating novel about our tenuous sense of self, friendship, and more
An unforgettable inquiry into the nature of memory
Sharp characters and introspection characterise an engrossing tale that dodges between the fragile and the crisply real
These segments have nothing to do with the novel and break the mood every time they appear. The shift from Fiona Mozley’s dark, immersive storytelling into a cheerful advocacy message is jarring and pulls you out of the narrative. It’s a real shame, because the book itself was excellent.
I ended up returning the audiobook because the interruptions made it hard to stay absorbed in the story. This must be a decision by the publishers rather than anything to do with the author, and it doesn’t do her work justice. I've written to the publishers asking them to release a clean version.
I tried to access the book on Spotify too but it has the same issue.
A great novel spoiled by intrusive, irrelevant bonus tracks the publisher has added
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Lorraine Kelly ads at the end of each chapter of the book meant I terminated reading it even though I had been enjoying it
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