Dreams of Sleep by Josephine Humphreys
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was the second Josephine Humphreys book I read and the first that she wrote; this is sparely beautiful in tone and the prose flows so simply and cleanly. The novel has a deeply meditative quality and also has the freshness of a first book, tooled and polished and refined. Even when I have read all of a writer’s work, as I have with Humphreys, I usually have a special fondness for the first book, and that remains true in this case. The plot is among the simplest to describe, the travails of a marriage that has lost its glow, the fear of infidelity, the fear of loss; a book you’ve read a thousand times, and yet in Humphreys’ hands it becomes effortlessly fresh and new. We remember that each marriage succeeds or fails in the specific terms of the people who are in it, and further, that the magic of a normal life, the struggles of the kind of people we see everyday, are anything but ordinary. This book will always have a special place on my shelf.