The Sleep Watcher, the third thoughtful novel by the gifted Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, features a narrator who floats free from her body at night and circles around invisibly, observing her family and friends. This departure into the supernatural from the author’s previous work does not leaven the sadness of her writing, and the book is even more melancholic than her Starling Days (2019), which opened with the protagonist contemplating suicide.  

Sixteen-year-old Katherine, or Kit as she is known, does not always like what she sees as she wanders about unobserved – though it does allow for some moments of comedy. She lives with her parents, F and M, and her younger brother Leo in a seaside town, working at the local museum in the holidays before her A-levels begin, and has a gentle boyfriend, Andrew, who likes drawing comic-book-style pictures of kraken. 

There’s an underlying violence to her parents’ relationship which Kit can’t quite fathom, even after she begins observing them at night during her ‘sleep watching’. The novel is a nuanced and powerful way of exploring domestic abuse, and I was moved by how Kit contemplates that if she were asked to testify against her father in court she might say that ‘in 16 years he had only been kind’ (although she has seen him grip her mother’s wrists too tightly), because this is part of the truth. She contrasts him with

men who are deliberate and considered bullies. Men who kick and stomp and crush their wives, sons, daughters. It is hard for me to talk about this man who was not all bad, or at least I don’t think he was.

The plot is powered by the fact that it is addressed to an unknown person, possibly a lover – although it isn’t Andrew. And there’s an ominous quality to the way Kit admits that she experiences adrenaline rushes similar to her father’s when he lashes out.

Buchanan’s examination of violence in families is sincere and punctilious – but I hope she’ll explore sunnier themes in her next novel.