Awakened

From an exciting new voice in horror comes the tense and surreal novel Awakened. Exploring the extreme aftermath of induced global sleeplessness and the horrors of love amidst lost sanity, this is a perfect read for fans of The Girl with All the Gifts and 28 Days Later.

Funded by a benevolent but misguided billionaire, a group of scientists developed a neural chip to allow the population to turn off sleep. First used by the military, those fitted with the chip developed strengthen metabolism. In the space of a year, everyone had one. You could turn the chip off at will... until one day, you couldn't. Deprived of the sanity that sleep brings, people quickly descended into madness, and the world changed - for the worse.

Now, marooned in the Tower of London, the surviving scientists struggle to find a cure in a new world, caged in by the screams of the Sleepless. Consumed by guilt for her part in the initial experiments, Thea Chares longs to know what has happened to her mother, whose illness had been the focal point of her previous life.

When two survivors, a man and a woman, stumble into the Tower, the seed of hope grows in the form of a new start. But all is not as it appears... the survivors display strange, dangerous habits and refuse to tell the scientists their names. As Thea finds herself inexplicably drawn to the man, life begins to spiral into a fever dream of hallucinations, violence and dark attraction, with a startlingly reveal waiting for them at daybreak.

Awakened is a dreamlike and gripping novel that will have readers questioning what's real and what's steeped in surreal until the very end.