By the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Miracles comes THE DREAMERS (Random House Hardcover; On Sale January 15, 2019), a mesmerizing new novel about a college town transformed by a strange illness that locks victims in a perpetual sleep and triggers life-altering dreams. THE DREAMERS has been optioned for television by Warren Littlefield/Fox 21. (Littlefield is the executive producer of The Handmaid’s Tale and Fargo.)
In an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a freshman girl 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 who carry her away, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and then another, and panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. As the number of cases multiplies, classes are canceled, and stores begin to run out of supplies. A quarantine is established. The National Guard is summoned.
Mei, an outsider in the cliquish hierarchy of dorm life, finds herself thrust together with an eccentric, idealistic classmate. After his wife falls victim to the sleep, a husband tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. A survivalist father succumbs
to the illness, leaving his daughters to fend for themselves. A psychiatrist, summoned from Los Angeles, attempts to make sense of the illness as it spreads through the town. Those infected are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, more than has ever been recorded.
They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what?
And at the hospital, unbeknownst to her as she sleeps, a new life grows within a college girl—a life that will ultimately challenge her notions of what is possible. Rife with fundamental mysteries of the human experience—the subconscious, the unstoppable passage of time, the profound bonds between people and what happens to those bonds in a crisis, THE DREAMERS is a breathtaking novel that startles and provokes its readers about the possibilities contained within a human life—in our waking days and, perhaps even more, in our dreams.
Karen Walker
Karen Thompson Walker is the author of The Age of Miracles, which was named a best book of the year by People, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Financial Times, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon. It was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and it was translated into twenty-seven languages. She was born and raised in San Diego and is a graduate of UCLA and the Columbia MFA program. Walker lives in Portland with her family, where she is a professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon.
