A sudden outbreak of a mysterious illness causes its victims to fall into a deep sleep from which they cannot be awakened. It starts on a college campus with a student and spreads throughout the small town of Santa Lora, CA. By the time the mechanism for transmission is discovered, it's too late to confine it, and the whole town must be quarantined. Because patients cannot care for themselves in that state (asleep), medical professionals, trained volunteers, and eventually anyone who isn't afflicted must tend to the dreamers. Some are lost to dehydration or starvation, others are killed accidentally when they lose consciousness, some never wake up at all. And while asleep, they have the most vivid dreams, which, upon awakening, seem real. Dreamers have lived whole other lives, others feel almost no time has passed at all. Some reexperience memories, others believe they've had visions, premonitions of what's to come. Walker (The Age of Miracles) offers up a satisfying, suspenseful page-turner that leaves readers curious about the possibility of dreams. VERDICT Recommended enthusiastically for general fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, 7/9/18.]-Karin Thogersen, Huntley Area P.L., IL © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Walker's highly anticipated follow-up to The Age of Miracles (2012) is a similar modern fantasy in which strange things that change the course of the world start to happen to everyday people. In this novel, a sleeping sickness slowly overcomes students at a small Southern California college. By the time anyone recognizes a pattern, it's too late to quarantine the campus (though they try), and the odd malady spreads to the surrounding town. Those stricken suddenly fall asleep and cannot be roused. Tests show that while they are not under any physical duress, they are having vivid dreams. The novel follows an assortment of specific victims, including a college freshman with a secret even she doesn't know, a doomsday-prepper-type and single father of two wild girls, and a mother who leaves a newborn baby and a perplexed husband behind. Readers will be drawn in by the telling as Walker manages to create spare prose that nonetheless conveys great detail, an approach that works well to add a bit of tension to this simultaneously languid and lush tale.--Rebecca Vnuk Copyright 2018 Booklist

Walker's richly imaginative and quietly devastating second novel (after The Age of Miracles) begins in a college dorm in an isolated town in the hills of Southern California, where a freshman thinks she is coming down with the flu. In fact, she has a mysterious disease that causes its victims to fall into a deep, dream-laden sleep from which they cannot be woken, and which sometimes leads to death. The disease spreads slowly at first, then more rapidly, and soon the whole town is under a quarantine. The perspective moves smoothly in and out of the minds of several of the college students and town residents, drawing back to look at the entire situation from a detached but compassionate point of view and then plunging back into the minds of those attempting to deal with the escalating problems. Among the characters are Mei, a lonely college freshman; 12-year-old Sara, who copes with an unhinged survivalist father; Sara's neighbors, a faculty couple with a newborn baby; and aging biology professor Nathaniel. As the majority of the people of the town fall victim to the disease, neuropsychiatrist Catherine Cohen, separated from her family by the quarantine, tries desperately to find its cause, until arson at a library that's being used as a makeshift hospital has unintended results on the state of some of the dreamers. The relatively large number of central characters makes it likely that some will succumb to the disease, upping the suspense of the story. 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. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Eavesdrop at any dinner party, and talk of sleep - and the lack thereof - abounds. Which sleep aids, natural remedies or strategies do you resort to during the lonely hours of the night? What about preslumber rituals? Oh, you're a new parent, good luck. Indeed, there is one question that is never posed during these commonplace conversations: What if you got too much sleep? This is what Karen Thompson Walker explores in her inventive, wellcrafted novel "The Dreamers." The story opens innocently enough: A freshman at Santa Lora College, in a small town about 70 miles from Los Angeles, doesn't stir one morning after a night out. Her shy roommate, Mei, doesn't bother to wake her. Later, in the early evening, Mei returns, finding her roommate in the same somnolent state that she had left her nine hours earlier. The paramedics are summoned, and the unconscious student is transported to the hospital. "On the other floors of the hospital that night, women labor while the girl sleeps. Babies are born while she sleeps," Walker writes in the novel's opening pages. "She sleeps while an old man dies in a distant room.... She sleeps through sunrise, and she sleeps through sunset. And yet, in those first few hours, the doctor can find nothing else wrong. She looks like an ordinary girl sleeping ordinary sleep." The sleep sickness blooms. First, slowly. Then, swiftly. About three weeks in, 500 citizens - old and young - have fallen into a permanent slumber. Expeditious measures are taken, including quarantines that begin with the college campus and the hospital, and soon the entire region is isolated from the rest of the world. "Every ordinary thing turns ominous," Walker writes. "A black bulldog wanders leashless in the street. Somewhere nearby, a teakettle whines for many hours. A trickle of water runs all day through the gutter, as if someone somewhere has collapsed while watering the lawn." Fans of Walker's best-selling debut, "The Age of Miracles," will recognize a handful of similarities between the two novels: Chaos ensues when something goes extraordinarily amiss (in her debut, the rotation of the earth slows down, and in this novel, individuals are trapped in sleep); both are set in Southern California, where Walker grew up; and both narratives tell coming-of-age stories (despite the multiple narrative threads of "The Dreamers," a boy-meets-girl scenario sparks one of the many moments of tenderness in this book). Instead of using the first-person voice, as in "The Age of Miracles," Walker works on a broader canvas here, with a roving, third-person omniscient narrator that creates a symphonic voice. Seamlessly, the author circulates through the town and a specific constellation of characters: Mei; Sara and Libby, daughters of a conspiracyfueled father; Ben, a young parent; Catherine, a neuropsychiatrist from Los Angeles who is attempting to figure out the precise nature of the illness; and Nathaniel, a biology professor who cares for his dementia-addled father. In the meantime, Walker telescopes in and out among these characters' experiences and the college town, animating both intimate and panoramic moments of the plague. As with the epidemic itself, there is a generous sweep within this story - and then, just as quickly, the author refocuses the narrative attention onto the ever-changing relational fault lines between her characters. "This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love," writes Walker. Her choice in perspective - combined with the use of the present tense - produces an immediate and urgent portrait of the mounting public health crisis and how the characters' lives are shaped by the epidemic. Here and there, the narrative gallops at an accelerated pace, almost tilting toward the melodramatic, but, for the most part, Walker bypasses this pitfall. At the same time, despite the dire circumstances, the omniscient narrator's voice, buoyant yet sympathetic, propels things along. There are a few minor missteps - convenient plot turns and character developments (for example, the back-story reveal of Matthew, the romantic interest of Mei, and the group of professionals that they encounter during their adventures together) - but these are easy to overlook. Finally, as the title suggests, dreams figure largely in this story, and Walker brings a new kind of meaning to this fictional device. As she writes near the novel's end, "Each dream contained its own unique physics." Readers may draw comparisons between "The Dreamers" and Emily St. John Mandel's "Station Eleven," a post-apocalyptic survivalist's tale set during the aftermath of a horrific flu pandemic, but in some ways, this novel has more in common, thematically speaking, with the haunting, beautiful stories of Lauren Groff's "Florida" - especially with the way that many of Groff's surreal stories explore the fear of bringing a generation of children into an increasingly dangerous world. Walker is clearly as preoccupied by the natural forces and rhythms of new life as she is by the end of life. What happens when children are abandoned? What transpires when unknown external forces, like a sleep virus, provoke these separations? Is anyone really up to the task? Can anyone ever recover from the heartbreak of this kind of infinite love? Even though I'm not a parent myself, I found the author's thoughtful observations of these bonds powerful and moving; Walker invites the reader into this life-defining experience rather than placing it on a distant pedestal. Taken altogether, she produces precarious, tender portraits of parents and children - newborns, teenagers and adults - and suggests that these relationships are what save us in the end. S. KIRK WALSH has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, Electric Literature, Longreads and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Walker, who set her first novel, The Age of Miracles (2012), in a dystopian near future, returns to the present with this science-fiction fairy tale about a mysterious epidemic putting inhabitants of a California community to sleep.The first victim in Santa Lora is a freshman at the local college discovered in her dorm room breathing but unwakeable. Soon more students are falling asleep, as are the medical personnel caring for them. On the 14th day, when there are 22 sleepers, the local hospital goes into quarantine when researchers conclude the culprit is an airborne virus. Too late. A combination of events including Halloween trick-or-treating and the escape of students from their quarantine spreads the virus. By the 18th day, the number of sleepers requiring round the clock care balloons to 500. The entire town is sealed off, but the number of those infected keeps growing. Within the spellbindingly measured narrative of the public health crisis are woven emotionally charged individual stories. A freshman's first sexual experience results in pregnancy the night before she's stricken; the chronicle of the growing life within her counterbalances the evolution of the epidemic. Two other freshmen become volunteers and unlikely lovers. An already paranoid college janitor recognizes the danger of contagion before everyone else; when he nevertheless is infected, his preteen daughters fend for themselves. Their neighbors cope with a fragile marriage while caring for their newborn infant, who may have been exposed to the virus through donated breast milk. A dementia patient seems to regain his consciousness just when others are losing theirs. Political refugees from Egypt see their lives torn apart yet again. The biggest surprise may come when Walker shifts focus to show the dreams and life within individual sleepers' minds.What is the nature of an epidemic? What is the nature of consciousness? What mix of loyalty and love binds individuals together? These are a few of the questions Walker raises in her provocative, hypnotic tale. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.