Sleeping beauty is no fairy-tale heroine

AANNA O

Matthew Blake HarperCollins, €14.99 nna O is the first novel by Matthew Blake and boy does he ever knock it out of the park. A good debut is generally a promise of what is to come but Blake has already arrived with a book that is pacy, riveting and contains genuinely fascinating facts about “resignation syndrome” – where patients fall into a deep sleep and don’t wake up again.

Anna O is infamous. At 25 she had “glided through life with barely a care. The nepo baby with her fancy politician mother and tie-less financier father. The liberal, artsy, Bedales-style boarding school. The hallowed quads of Oxford. Then enough start-up capital to bootstrap a small magazine and pose as a media entrepreneur.”

Then she brutally murders her two best friends and business partners.

Nobody knows why as since the night of the crime Anna has been in a deep sleep from which she can’t be roused. After four years, with time to take the case to court running out, Anna is brought to a fancy private sleep clinic in a last bid attempt to awaken her.

The story is mainly told by Ben, a sleep expert, who is trying to revive Anna. The cruel irony is that her crimes directly led to the ruination of Ben’s life. His wife was the first officer at the scene of the murders and became the lead detective in the subsequent investigation. The stress, media intrusion and the prolific online communities dedicated to the case resulted in the couple’s divorce.

The only criticism I had was that Ben droned on a lot about his daughter with the irritating nickname KitKat, but even that had a reason. Anna O is a proper page turner, with many twists and a very surprising reveal at the end.

Books, as any bibliophile already knows, are pretty much the best thing ever invented. Not just their immense power to shape the broader world but, more importantly, on an individual level.

Reading is one of the most immersive, intense, life-affirming