Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Length: 320 pages
Audiobook Length: 10 hours and 29 minutes
First Published: 2019
View in Goodreads
Buy on Amazon
Publisher’s Description
One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster.
Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?
Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life—if only we are awakened to them.
Quotes from The Dreamers
“To close one’s eyes can be an act of survival.”
“Who are we to say that they are not right now dreaming a better world?”
“When one’s life seems broken beyond repair, there remains one last move: a person can at least shut her eyes.”
“This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love.”
About Karen Thompson Walker
Karen Thompson Walker is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Age of Miracles and The Dreamers. She lives with her husband, novelist Casey Walker, in Portland, Oregon, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing. Visit the author’s website →
Featured In
