Between Two Covers: Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease explores the long nights of insomnia

August 19th, 2026

For anyone who has spent a night staring at the ceiling, Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping may feel less like a book and more like a place you’ve already visited.

Published in 2020 by Grove Press, the 176 page book is part insomnia memoir, part meditation, part short fiction and part philosophical wandering. Harvey captures the strange elasticity of time that comes with being awake while the rest of the world seems to have disappeared into sleep.

Dr. Todd Robinson, associate professor in UNO’s Writers’ Workshop, reviewed the book for KVNO’s Between Two Covers.

Listeners may remember Robinson’s earlier review of Harvey’s Orbital, a novel set aboard the International Space Station. While The Shapeless Unease does not reach the same literal heights, Robinson finds a similar quality in Harvey’s writing. She allows the narrative to drift, following the unpredictable movements of a mind that refuses to settle.

That approach is particularly effective when Harvey describes the mental cacophony of insomnia. Thoughts multiply, old arguments return, regrets surface and seemingly insignificant worries become impossible to ignore.

For Robinson, Harvey’s writing captures both the misery and the absurdity of that experience.

There is a dry, distinctly British humor running through the book. Harvey pokes fun at her own attempts to force herself to sleep, even as she searches for relief. Her suggestions can become deliberately ridiculous, turning the rituals of sleep into something almost comic.

But beneath the humor is a serious examination of what prolonged sleeplessness does to the mind and body.

Harvey moves through sleepless nights and the exhausted days that follow, considering writing, exercise, nature and other possible sources of consolation. Rather than offering an easy solution to insomnia, she examines the condition from every angle.

Robinson describes the result as a book that is both “drowsy and urgent”, a fitting contradiction for a work about being desperately tired while unable to sleep.

The book also raises larger questions about modern life. In a world of glowing screens, constant connectivity and increasingly relentless technology, Harvey wonders whether contemporary life itself has become a kind of insomnia.

Yet she also turns that questioning inward, asking why sleep can seem so effortless for others while remaining frustratingly out of reach for some.

The result is a haunted, sometimes funny and deeply reflective book about one of the most ordinary, and maddening, human experiences.

For readers who know the loneliness of the hours before dawn, The Shapeless Unease may offer something more valuable than a cure, the feeling that someone else has been awake, too.