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The Shapeless Unease

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Orbital

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The Shapeless Unease

By: Samantha Harvey
Narrated by: Samantha Harvey
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Sleep. Sleep. Like money, you only think about it when you have too little. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. It becomes the prism through which you see the world and nothing can exist except in relation to it.

Samantha Harvey’s insomnia arrived, seemingly, from nowhere; for a year she has spent her nights chasing sleep that rarely comes. She’s tried everything to appease it. Nothing is helping.

What happens when one of the basic human needs goes unmet? For Samantha Harvey, extreme sleep deprivation resulted in a raw clarity about life itself. Original and profound, The Shapeless Unease is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and grief, and the will to survive.

© Samantha Harvey 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 Art & Literature Authors

Critic reviews

[A] remarkable book… [The Shapeless Unease is] an extraordinary journey, but it’s also mesmerising. Harvey writes with hypnotic power and poetic precision about – well, about everything: grief, pain, memory, family, the night sky, a lake at sunset, what it means to dream and what it means to suffer and survive. (Christina Patterson)
A delight to read… suffused with the sense of a timeless fable… ineffably rewarding. (Colin Grant)
Urgent and wild, but also dazzling in its precision. This is what it must be like to try to keep hold of a brilliant mind that is threatening to unspool… a dark, seductive book about fear and madness and their allure… Reading The Shapeless Unease can feel not unlike dipping into strange, unchartered waters: it is by turns bracing and soothing, with a dark undertow and glimmers of light at the surface, and one emerges from it with an altered perspective, a sense of time having slowed down. (Sophie McBain)
Samantha Harvey's dazzling, dizzying trip through the nightmare world of the sleepless...[is a] wondrous little book... a treasure trove of material… The Shapeless Unease is also one of the best books you will find about swimming. And its wonders. (Roger Alton)
Intricately intriguing… astonishing… [The Shapeless Unease is] a particular joy. It moves between topics with ease, and yet at its heart it is an emotional book… I haven’t read a book which is quite as clear about being a writer. (Stuart Kelly)
An engrossing vision of how our lives are knit together - day to day, night to night, and thought to thought.
The Shapeless Unease is a merciless and self-mocking memoir in which Harvey shows us the insomniac’s universe of “edgeless expanse”… Writing should take us to places we wouldn’t otherwise go, and Harvey invites us to open our eyes in the darkness and feel the tiger in the room. (Frances Wilson)
The Shapeless Unease contains many beautiful and poignant passages about the human will to keep on living… [and] Harvey’s imagery casts a spell. (Johanna Thomas-Corr)
What a spectacularly good book. It is so controlled and yet so WILD. One of the best books I’ve read about writing. One of the best books I’ve read about swimming. One of the best books I’ve read about mourning. And easily one of the truest and best books I’ve read about what it’s like to be alive now, in this country.
How can a book about a sensual deprivation be so sensuous and so full? Gritty with particulars, concrete and substantial even when it is most philosophical and far-reaching. I loved reading it before I fell asleep every night – it seemed to give my sleep resonance and poetry. What a beautiful book.
All stars
Most relevant
What has happened to Samantha is happening to me, almost exactly (although our politics is different!)
Her narration really adds to the genuine, clever, intelligent layering of these stories and events
I’m not easily captivated but this book brought me to stop and consider chapters to absorb them before I moved on, so poignant was every element.
Samantha’s dealings with her GP, her wrestles with this condition and her subtle sledgehammer conclusions both comforted me and fired my mind to follow her course of recovery.
Thank you
I loved ready your book

Peter from Whitstable

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Some really poignant and insightful bits, but also some quite lengthy ethereal and overly poetic tangents.

Heartbreaking account, but perhaps a little ethereal

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