The Dreamers

In an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a freshman stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep, and does not wake up. Her roommate Mei cannot rouse her; neither can the paramedics, nor the doctors at the hospital. Then a second girl falls asleep, and a third, and panic takes the college and then the town.

Classes are cancelled, stores empty, a quarantine is established and the National Guard arrives. Karen Thompson Walker follows the town through it in a wide, quiet ensemble: Mei and an idealistic classmate thrown together; two visiting professors trying to protect their newborn; a father who succumbs and leaves his daughters to fend for themselves; a psychiatrist summoned from Los Angeles to make sense of an illness that makes no sense.

The sleepers, it turns out, are showing more brain activity than has ever been recorded. They are dreaming heightened dreams — the novel's central question is what of, and what those dreams have to do with the waking world it is quietly dismantling.