In Somnis

Her mother is dead, her boyfriend has left, and everything she owns from Boston fits in two suitcases in her car. The narrator drives three thousand miles to a town she has not seen in more than ten years, because her best friend keeps appearing in her dreams with the same message: Come to me. That friend has not been awake for twelve years.

She does not plan to stay. Then she meets three men, each of them complicated. A sharp-tongued writer enters her dreams uninvited and challenges how she sees the world. A psychologist looks at her as though he has both dreaded and longed for her all his life.

The third is an innkeeper, freckled and paint-stained, who makes her feel seen and cherished. Her days in town are shared among the three of them, while her nights belong to a dream world with no fixed rules, where nothing happens by chance.

The story is told in the first person and mixes romance with a dreamlike, unsettling mystery. As the dreams grow stranger and the boundary between sleeping and waking wears thin, the man who holds her friend captive begins to take notice of her.