, Victor Manibo (Erewhon) and , Joma West (Tordotcom)
THE events in Victor Manibo鈥檚 The Sleepless open 10 years after a pandemic. The initial panic is over and adjustments have settled into place. This outbreak didn鈥檛 kill anyone. It just removed the ability to sleep from about 25 per cent of the population.
The upsides of this condition become apparent when it turns out that this insomnia doesn鈥檛 exact a cost. Why would you sleep if you didn鈥檛 have to?
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Society in Joma West鈥檚 Face has changed too, inexplicably and for the worse. Draconian social rules determine where on the social ladder you are born, but you can climb it if you master the art of 鈥渇aceplay鈥�.
Faceplay consists not only of perfecting your identity, brand and beauty, but of showing mastery over your emotions. Your status rises and falls with your ability to dominate other people鈥檚 brands, which you do by disturbing their emotional equilibrium with quick-witted and subtle jabs, while maintaining your own icy cool. 鈥淭he best face is no face at all,鈥� one character realises midway through the book.
Master the art and you can land a partner who was born higher up the ladder, and, in the final lunge of the social climb, engineer a baby that perfectly complements the family brand. Just never let your guard down.
In this Hobbesian, all-against-all nightmare, there is no such thing as an ally, no safety to retreat to. It is a crushingly, abjectly lonely and stressful world.
The unusual structure of West鈥檚 domestic dystopia is closer to literary sci-fi. Some scenes are rerun from the perspective of different characters, which works because no one gives anything away. The only way to understand what lies beneath is to experience it from the inside.
Unfortunately, Face ends much too abruptly and with too few of its threads tied up. That said, it still qualifies as a ripping read. This was a rare glimpse into the mind of an author who has taken in all the worst aspects of social media hustle culture and extended them to their absurd, logical endpoint.
On her website, West identifies explicitly as a third-culture writer, elegant shorthand for someone who lives in one culture with parents from another that must make an uneasy space for the mix of the two. Such a perspective breeds the ability to patiently unstitch the fabric of a society that everyone else accepts 鈥� and expose its flaws.
While Manibo doesn鈥檛 call himself a third-culture writer, he is an immigrant whose writing shows the same hard-won acumen and perspicacity that comes from an outsider perspective.
His keenly observed pandemic has clearly been crafted from the failed systemic responses to HIV and covid-19. Manibo has helped himself to the surfeit of cautionary tales and grimly funny corporate advantage-seeking that emerged in the wake of both.
His vision carries the weight of inevitable truth: once a couple of people stop needing to sleep, it won鈥檛 be long before everyone else has to get in line and anyone who doesn鈥檛 becomes obsolete.
Both authors offer compulsively readable entertainment delivered under a smog of crushing despair. As befits such noir-inflected writing, even when an ending is ostensibly happy, there is ambiguity. 鈥淭he world is a very old place and it鈥檚 seen its fair share of revolutionaries,鈥� says a character in Face. 鈥淏ut at the end of the day鈥� well, look around.鈥�
Sally also recommends鈥�
A similar premise to The Sleepless, but a corporation makes money out of the pandemic by matching the sleepless with聽sleep donors.
Here, the insomnia kills. For聽everyone who loves this work of literary speculative fiction, there is someone fulminating over the main聽character.
