Awake Awake

“A warm, kindly and beautifully written novel about growing up in a family and in history, about inconvenient memory and haunted repression.”

“An incredible achievement—a story of friendship, memory, loss, and moral duty unlike any I’ve read before. It’s beautifully written, elegantly structured, and so tight with tension that I paced my office as I read the last fifty pages. It’s a masterfully crafted love story and adventure story and family mythology all rolled into one, and chock full of well-earned surprises; every character and storyline could be its own novel, and yet they come together so thunderously and convincingly that I believed even the hallucinations. It blew me away! You’ll read it in two sittings.”

"A fascinating novel about our tenuous sense of self, friendship, and more."

"A stunning jewel of a novel. In crisply evoked scenes, Mozley brings to life all the peril and appetite of childhood friendship, set against the changing political climate of the early twenty-first century. It is a book in which the past lives on in the present, in which history itself proves skittish and irreducible. It is, finally, a gorgeous testament to the fierce bonds that connect us when we are young and the memories that shape not only who we were once, but who we become." 

“Awake Awake is a unique, visionary novel about the toll of memory and the power and fragility of the human heart and mind. Fiona Mozley gives a masterclass in the novel form, showing just how much room for invention we still have. I couldn't put it down.”

“A slow-burn novel that hums with disquieting energy”

“An unforgettable inquiry into the nature of memory.” 

“There’s something pleasantly old-fashioned (i.e., assured) about Mozley’s third book…The careful toggling act Mozley does in this book between a troubled interior world and a troubling wider one sometimes brought Sigrid Nunez and Deborah Levy to mind, in the best ways. Like the latter, Mozley’s interested in the slippery sides of our shared delusions: memory, and history. This makes for a fascinating structure, but I especially adored the way this book captured a generation whose personal and political consciousness was shaped in part by 9/11 and the war in Iraq. A deep, uncanny, surprising read.”

“The coming-of-age of a group of school friends, and the psychological struggles of one in particular, drives a layered story of connection, memory, and identity in Mozley’s intense third novel. Mozley’s nonlinear narrative swoops among events major and minor, creating a thick brew of ideas. Vividly written and visualized… Sharp characters and introspection characterize an engrossing tale that dodges between the fragile and the crisply real.”

“Mary’s hazy unreliable-narrator point of view might be disconcerting but it shines when it focuses on the four friends’ divergent adulthood paths. Mozley's protagonist may well be mirroring our own uncertain world.” 

“Awake Awake is, on the one hand, a clarion call—a clear-eyed view of contemporary moral and political failure in the UK—and on the other, an assembly of engrossing philosophical and metaphysical engagements with the nature of memory. Its barely resolved uncertainties make it a fascinating read…”