Watching Samantha Harvey obliterate the advice that’s so often and so smugly offered to the exhausted...is one of the grim pleasures of The Shapeless Unease.

...novelist Samantha Harvey has produced, in The Shapeless Unease, a slim, intense memoir about her own year-long experience of nocturnal unrest.

Harvey’s memoir of sleeplessness is like a small and well-worn eiderdown quilt: It might not cover everything, but it both cools and warms, lofts and lulls, settling gradually on its inhabitant with an ethereal solidity.

... profound, earthshaking.

This book’s best, most successfully prickly vignettes take place in the offices of doctors and therapists, where Ms. Harvey is blandly chastised again and again for her failure to self-actualize.

Harvey’s memoir in which she relives and dissects the sleepless year in question, is so exquisitely written it’s a challenge to review, as there is an impulse to quote nearly every precise, stylized line. Her chronicle of morality, mortality and memory is adept at capturing the ineffable reservations with — and appreciation for — being alive.

With my history of sleep problems, I can vouch for the fact that the inability to sleep is one of the most infuriating experiences a person can go through. Harvey’s helplessness resonated with me as I read the book over the course of two nights of insomnolence while trying to eke out every second of sleep I could.

...[a] deeply felt memoir.

The prose has the washed-out tone of a writer who has suffered too much for too long. Bleary-eyed, Harvey tends to ramble. She loosely corrals her thoughts in many stylistic kennels: stream of consciousness, the future tense, therapeutic fragments, a case study of herself; or in philosophical wanderings about, for example, the word great in British culture or how the language of the Amazonian Pirahã tribe has no way of expressing abstraction or recursiveness. Harvey also includes shards of fiction...The book’s shagginess is surely intentional—art mirroring life, as advertised in the title. Yet your patience for this strategy will depend on how much you recognize yourself in Harvey’s burnt-at-both-ends protagonist, as well as on your taste for very dry gallows humor.

Harvey’s examination of her year-long insomnia is an excavation of the emotions that might cause sleeplessness. It’s a kind of philosophical detective story strewn with submerged clues.

Even Samantha Harvey can’t figure out how best to sum up this genre-defying sort-of-autobiography, notionally pegged to her midlife battle with chronic insomnia in the months after Britain voted to leave the EU. 'What are you writing?' a friend asks the novelist. 'Not sure,' she says. 'Some essays. Not really essays. Not essays at all. Some things'.

... a disturbing, vivid account. The prose is urgent and wild, but also dazzling in its precision. This is what it must be like to try to keep hold of a brilliant mind that is threatening to unspool.

This is an extremely curious book, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.

Harvey is the author of four delicate, searching, if rather ponderous novels...but with this memoir she has found a more distinctive voice as a poet of sleeplessness.

... often brilliant and sometimes frustrating.

The Shapeless Universe is a merciless and self-mocking memoir in which Harvey shows us the insomniac’s universe of 'edgeless expanse.' The register shifts throughout and so too does Harvey’s perspective on herself.

[Harvey] throws it all in: memories of her childhood, the text of a short story she is working on, her fear of the menopause, her regrets about childlessness, her encounters with her doctor... her experience of being assaulted once in Australia, her fascination with Daniel Everett’s great books about the Pirahã people of the Amazon whose language has no past or future tenses, her joy in wild swimming and again her anger about Brexit, factory farming, death and the way people speed through her village.

...as Harvey makes clear in this masterful and captivating memoir, insomnia is not easily defined by its causes, and it’s certainly not easily defeated. At once intensely personal and universal, Harvey’s ruminations on the agony of sleepless nights and the way exhaustion ravages every aspect of waking life. Despairing at the useless advice she’s given and feeling powerless to solve her severe sleeping problems, Harvey nonetheless finds courage to fight on..

Sleeplessness gets the Susan Sontag illness-as-metaphor treatment in this pensive, compact, lyrical inquiry into the author’s nighttime demons ...Though the narrative is a highly personal interior monologue, others who have suffered insomnia will find abundant resonance.