This story is about a girl's compulsive obsession with her teacher and it is a compulsively obsessive book, taking you to the wilds of Dartmoor and the depth of your senses, both physical and emotional. What happens when childish dreams become reality? When emotions stretch across generations? And what if the past comes back to haunt you? This is a dark and moving literary novel, up there with the most evocative women's writing in the English language: the depth of characterisation you might expect from Austen and Bronte but with a modern more sensually explicit approach.
Cecilia is obsessively in love with her teacher, the older, married Mr. Dahl. She plots and speculates, yet she never guesses that what she dreams of could actually happen. Is it her imagination, or is the high-minded Mr. Dahl responding to her? Cecilia's mother Dora wants the good life. She and her husband moved to Dartmoor so their children could run wild, free to make their own choices and mistakes. But Dora discovers that there is more to the countryside idyll, and indeed to her own marriage, than she assumed, when she finds herself fascinated by the very last, the very worst person she could fall for: the elegant and dangerous Elisabeth Dahl. Now, after twenty years, Cecilia is coming home, to face Dora, and to face her past. But the excitement and pain she had thought were buried cannot be buried. The past is a dangerous place.
'In You Joanna Briscoe writes with elegance and passion about the clashes, misunderstandings and silences between generations. It is dangerously addictive: life was put firmly on hold while I raced to finish it' Maggie O'Farrell
Praise for Sleep With Me:
'Seductive, scary and almost frighteningly readable' Julie Myerson
'A beautifully written and emotionally candid novel which also happens to be a page-turner' Jonathan Coe
'Elegiac, beautiful, evocative ... Sleep With Me works in much the same way as an obsession ... you may wish to escape, but have already become addicted' Daily Telegraph
Author
About Joanna Briscoe
Joanna Briscoe is the author of Mothers and Other Lovers, Skin and the highly acclaimed Sleep with Me, which was published in ten countries and adapted for ITV Drama by Andrew Davies. She has been a columnist for the Independent and the Guardian, for whom she is now a literary critic. Joanna Briscoe lives in London with her family.
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