Awakened

A year ago, funded by a benevolent but misguided billionaire a group of scientists developed a neural chip to allow us to turn off sleep. Used first by the military, those fitted with the chip developed hyped and strengthened metabolisms. Soon everyone had one. You could turn the chip off; until one day you couldn’t. Deprived of the sanity that sleep brings the world fell apart.

Now, marooned in the Tower of London, in a world silent except for the distant screams of the Sleepless, a small group of surviving scientists are struggling to find a cure. Thea Chares is one of them, and our narrator, consumed by guilt for her part in the experiment and haunted by what happened to her mother during her long illness.

And then one day two survivors, a man and a woman make their way into the Tower. But all is not as it appears. They bring with them the hope of a new start and the danger of a final ending. And Chares finds herself inexplicably drawn to the man, who will not tell her his name. Events spiral into a fever-dream of hallucination, violence, dark attraction, a shocking reveal and redemption. Of sorts.