From the author of the splendid Brain Rose (1989), another telling near/medium-future sociological probe. This time: What if people no longer needed to sleep? Leisha Camden belongs to a new generation of genetically enhanced children: she's tall, slim, intelligent, beautiful—and she doesn't sleep. So, growing up, Leisha and her fellow-Sleepless rapidly outshine their Sleeper contemporaries. But later, after global economic changes, most Americans subsist mindlessly on the public dole while resenting the success of the Sleepless— especially when it emerges that the Sleepless are also immortal. So the Sleepless, led by the paranoid elitist Jennifer Sharifi, establish Sanctuary, a secure enclave where their genetic research can continue unobserved. Lawyer Leisha, who holds to sharing-caring values within a pluralistic society, rejects Sanctuary, preferring to offer practical advancement to ambitious Sleepers and Sleepless alike. Eventually, the Sleepless move Sanctuary into an orbiting habitat, where, having bred a third generation of Sleepless with even more astonishing abilities, Sharifi orders the preparation of biological weapons for a showdown with Sleeper Earth. But those freakish new children, their talents amplified by the lucid dreams developed by one of Leisha's Sleepers, overthrow Sharifi and jubilantly reaffirm Leisha's egalitarian principles. Though didactic (without being preachy) and uneven in places: thrilling drama, compelling dialectic.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-12189-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
How much you enjoy this is in direct proportion to how much trouble you think we’re all in. Sleep tight.
An outcast in a supposedly utopian future tries to figure out what’s wrong with the world and how to fix it. Join the club.
Well, sure, why not? Kling, the author of a bunch of texts about living with a kangaroo that got translated into a podcast and then turned into three books (all in German, so Google Translate is your friend), enters mainstream author mode with this bitter satire of consumer culture and the modern political sphere. In this kind of book, there’s typically an ordinary guy to represent us, the reader—think Arthur Dent as opposed to Ford Prefect in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Our main guy here is Peter Jobless, although the point of view bounces around all over the place. Welcome to QualityLand, where everything, from your stuff to your love life, has been optimized for you by algorithm. If you couldn't tell from his moniker, Peter is a bit of a screw-up, just coming off a long-term relationship with Sandra Admin, who’s happily dumped him based on the admonishment of QualityLand's dating service, QualityPartner, which matched them up automatically in the first place. Black humor abounds: There's John of Us, the political candidate who happens to be an android, and TheShop, which essentially serves as the company store for the world. The interstitial bits—news bulletins, guidebook entries, and the inevitable comments section—are particularly funny and give context to QualityLand's odd rules and tics. Despite the novel's comic approach, the nature of the narrative is heavily political, holding up a black mirror to our own troubled times. In addition to the pitch-black political satire, the novel's portrayal of economic inequality highlights a problem that wreaks havoc on our own lives. The characters aren't particularly likable and the narrative is a bit unhinged, but these days, a little comic relief might do us all some good.
How much you enjoy this is in direct proportion to how much trouble you think we’re all in. Sleep tight.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3296-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Lovely: a fairy tale for grown-ups, both partaking in and departing from a rich literary tradition.
A lyrical, allusive (and elusive) voyage into the mists of British folklore by renowned novelist Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go, 2005, etc.).
There be giants buried beneath the earth—and also the ancient kings of Britain, Arthur among them. Ishiguro’s tale opens not on such a declaration but instead on a hushed tone; an old man has been remembering days gone by, and the images he conjures, punctuated by visions of a woman with flowing red hair, may be truthful or a troubling dream. Axl dare not ask his neighbors, fellow residents of a hillside and bogside burrow, for help remembering, “[f]or in this community, the past was rarely discussed.” With his wife, who bears the suggestive if un-Arthurian name Beatrice, the old man sets off on a quest in search of the past and of people forgotten. As it unfolds, Axl finds himself in the company of such stalwarts as a warrior named Wistan, who is himself given to saying such things as “[t]he trees and moorland here, the sky itself seem to tug at some lost memory,” and eventually Sir Gawain himself. The premise of a nation made up of amnesiac people longing for meaning is beguiling, and while it opens itself to heavy-handed treatment, Ishiguro is a master of subtlety; as with Never Let Me Go, he allows a detail to slip out here, another there, until we are finally aware of the facts of the matter, horrible though they may be. By the time the she-dragon named Querig enters the picture, the reader will already well know that we’re in Tolkien-ish territory—but Tolkien by way of P.D. James, with deep studies in character and allegory layered onto the narrative. And heaps of poetry, too, even as forgetfulness resolves as a species of PTSD: “I was but a young knight then….Did you not all grow old in a time of peace? So leave us to go our way without insults at our back.”
Lovely: a fairy tale for grown-ups, both partaking in and departing from a rich literary tradition.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-27103-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
