CURL UP WITH “THE SLEEPWALKER” – EXCERPTS

Welcome to another Tuesday celebrating bookish events, First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea; and Teaser Tuesdays hosted by Ambrosia, at The Purple Booker.

Today’s feature is an e-ARC from NetGalley:  The Sleepwalker, by Chris Bohjalian, to be released on 1/10/17.

 

 

Intro (Chapter One)

Everyone in the county presumed that my mother’s body was decaying—becoming porridge—at the bottom of the Gale River.  It was the year 2000, and we were but three seasons removed from the Y2K madness:  the overwrought, feared end of the digital age.  It was a moment in time when a pair of matching towers still stood near the tip of lower Manhattan.  Fracking and photobomb and selfie were years from becoming words, but we were only months from adding to our vocabularies the expression hanging chad.

I was twenty-one that summer and fall, and my sister was twelve.  Neither of us fully recovered.

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Teaser:  “I keep meaning to stop by the house and check in on all of you,” Marilyn said, and she shook her head and smiled in a way that at least hinted at self-loathing.  Disappointment in herself.  I hadn’t seen Marilyn since the very first days after my mother had disappeared.  Marilyn, like most everyone else, had moved on. (42%).

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Synopsis:  When Annalee Ahlberg goes missing, her children fear the worst. Annalee is a sleepwalker whose affliction manifests in ways both bizarre and devastating. Once, she merely destroyed the hydrangeas in front of her Vermont home. More terrifying was the night her older daughter, Lianna, pulled her back from the precipice of the Gale River bridge. The morning of Annalee’s disappearance, a search party combs the nearby woods. Annalee’s husband, Warren, flies home from a business trip. Lianna is questioned by a young, hazel-eyed detective. And her little sister, Paige, takes to swimming the Gale to look for clues. When the police discover a small swatch of fabric, a nightshirt, ripped and hanging from a tree branch, it seems certain Annalee is dead, but Gavin Rikert, the hazel-eyed detective, continues to call, continues to stop by the Ahlbergs’ Victorian home. As Lianna peels back the layers of mystery surrounding Annalee’s disappearance, she finds herself drawn to Gavin, but she must ask herself: Why does the detective know so much about her mother? Why did Annalee leave her bed only when her father was away? And if she really died while sleepwalking, where was the body?
Conjuring the strange and mysterious world of parasomnia, a place somewhere between dreaming and wakefulness, The Sleepwalker is a masterful novel from one of our most treasured storytellers.

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What do you think?  Do you want to keep reading?  I’ve been eagerly awaiting this book for months.

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