Sleep with Me

A Novel

"The day our child was conceived, someone else arrived. She was there as the cells fused, like a ghost." In a moment of giggling chaos, Richard and Lelia sleep together while getting dressed for a holiday party. Arriving late and still flushed, they barely register a slight, drab woman who, like a shadow, threatens the happiness they've achieved. Their reality slowly shifts: Mysterious fragments of a story about a troubled child appear on Richard's email. A friend confides his adulterous affair, and Richard voyeuristically hangs on every detail. Richard grows more ambivalent about the approaching birth of his child; he becomes distracted and remote, and Lelia suspects another woman. In her loneliness and longing Lelia makes a surprising decision that nearly destroys the life that she and Richard have worked so hard to create. Told with astonishing clarity from both Richard and Lelia's points of view, Sleep with Me is an extraordinary tale of obsession and desire that takes hold, body and soul, and doesn't let go until the final page is turned.
Joanna Briscoe has written two novels: Mothers and Other Lovers, which won the Betty Trask Award, and Skin. She lives in London.
Praise for Joanna Briscoe: "A formidably talented writer. Her prose is polished, sophisticated, and seductive."-Independent