The view from on high: The Sleep Watcher, by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, reviewed

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’.