I feel extremely fortunate to have such a kind and brilliant editor, Kate Medina. Thank you, Kate, for putting so much thought and so much care into these pages.
Thank you to the rest of the Random House team, especially Anna Pitoniak, Erica Gonzalez, London King, Gina Centrello, Susan Kamil, and Evan Camfield. Thank you also to copyeditor Deb Dwyer for a particularly thorough and thoughtful read.
Thank you to Suzanne Baboneau at Simon & Schuster UK for your continued enthusiasm.
Thank you to Eric Simonoff at WME for your encouragement, savvy, and freindship. Thank you also to the rest of the amazing WME team, especially Laura Bonner, Tracy Fischer, Jazmine Goguen, Alicia Gordon, and Lauren Szurgot.
I am also grateful to have come across the following books in my research, all of which were cruciaclass="underline" Awakenings by Oliver Sacks, Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar, Spillover by David Quammen, A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, Dreamland by David K. Randall, and, from the Oxford Very Short Introduction series: Sleep by Steven W. Lockley and Russell G. Foster, Dreaming by J. Allan Hobson, Freud by Anthony Storr, Jung by Anthony Stevens, and Consciousness by Susan Blackmore.
And now to my family:
For treating me like a sister, thank you, Liz Chu and Kiel Walker. For love and enthusiasm—and many hours of crucial babysitting—thank you, Cheryl Walker and Steve Walker.
Thank you to my parents, Jim Thompson and Martha Thompson, for all your love, help, interest (and babysitting!)—and for being my biggest fans.
Thank you, sweet Hazel, for your amazing brain, your enormous personality, and for generally enlarging my life—as well as this book. (I added a newborn to this story when you were eleven days old.) Thank you also to tiny, mysterious Penny for big smiles and inspiration and for sleeping so soundly on my chest while I finished this book.
Lastly, thank you, Casey, to whom I owe so much it’s hard to settle on the right words, so I’ll just say this: for everything.
BY KAREN THOMPSON WALKER
The Dreamers
The Age of Miracles
About the Author
KAREN THOMPSON WALKER is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Age of Miracles, which has been translated into twenty-seven languages and named one of the best books of the year by People, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Financial Times, among others. Born and raised in San Diego, she is a graduate of UCLA and the Columbia MFA program. Walker lives with her husband, the novelist Casey Walker, and their two daughters in Portland. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon.
Newsletter
Advance praise for The Dreamers
“[An] imaginative, disturbing, and ultimately spellbinding narrative, which asks provocative questions about our concepts of time and connection, and the bounds of possibility for life on earth.”
“You’ll be mesmerized by this well-constructed, vividly drawn exploration of the concept of dreams versus reality.”
“With mellifluous prose, Walker traces victims’ experiences (awake and asleep), along with how their family members, friends, and doctors respond to the crisis.”
“The Dreamers is a beautifully written novel that is powerful, thoughtful, and entirely original.”
“Richly imaginative and quietly devastating… Walker jolts the narrative with surprising twists, ensuring it keeps its energy until the end. This is a skillful, complex, and thoroughly satisfying novel about a community in peril.”
Copyright
The Dreamers is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Karen Thompson Walker
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Walker, Karen Thompson, author.
Title: The dreamers : a novel / Karen Thompson Walker.
Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058603 | ISBN 9780812994162 | ISBN 9780812994179 (ebook)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Science fiction
Classification: LCC PS3623.A4366 D74 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2017058603
Ebook ISBN 9780812994179
Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Anna Kochman
Cover photograph: Kurguzova/Getty Images
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