The sleepless

Initially considered a pandemic, Sleeplessness has no clear means of transmission, no known adverse effects--the infected just don't need to sleep anymore. And there is a clear benefit to corporate capitalism--there's even more time to hustle when someone doesn't need to sleep. Jamie is a Sleepless investigative journalist who walks into work one morning to find his boss dead of an apparent suicide. The plot thickens, however. He and his team were working on a potentially explosive story: the company is under threat of buyout by a conglomerate with a nasty reputation. As a thriller, there is plenty of misdirection next to plenty of well-placed hints to make the mystery satisfying. Ultimately, this is a tale of the insidious, corporate-capitalist implications of a plague of people who can't sleep, the environmental impact of people who never take a break, and the human consequences of a life without dreams. Queerness and immigrant experience inform the background of the novel, along with the purely speculative world building around how cities and society might react to truly unsleeping populations.

Manibo's slow, thoughtful debut presents a stark view of society in the 2040s through the eyes of New York journalist Jamie Vega, who's determined to prove that his boss and mentor, Simon, was murdered. When Jamie discovers Simon dead at his desk with a bottle of wine and an empty tube of contraband drugs, he immediately suspects foul play. As Jamie investigates which of Simon's enemies may be responsible, Manibo draws readers into an eerily realistic near future where visors have superseded smart phones, maglev trains allow for fast travel across the U.S., and roughly a quarter of the world's population suffer from hyperinsomnia--a condition that prevents sleep. As one of the Sleepless, Jamie devotes his extra hours to pursuing leads and exposes a startling fact: he was the last person to see Simon alive, an encounter he has no memory of. Though Jamie's lead suspect, a disreputable man eager to buy Simon's media company and fold it into his megacorporation, appears clichéd at first, Manibo gradually reveals a frightening depth to these aspirations as Jamie draws closer to unravelling both the cause of his amnesia and the person responsible for Simon's death. Manibo neatly dissects the drawbacks of capitalist demands on society in this taut near-future procedural. It's smart, high-tech noir. Agent: Eddie Schneider, JABberwocky (Aug.)