What is it like to live with chronic insomnia? For Marie Darrieussecq, not sleeping began after the birth of her first child and continues more than 20 years later. She wonders if it is connected to her hypervigilance, to her fear of her children dying. Or, she wonders, will writing this book help her to sleep again? Here, she recounts her own experiences alongside those of fellow insomniacs, mostly writers - Ovid, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Franz Kafka, Georges Perec and others (some of whom claim a connection between insomnia and creativity). With her inimitable humour, she describes her dealings with a somnologist and her attempts to find a remedy. This book will awaken you to the otherness of our world. Of erased presences, ghosts, endangered species. Insomnia feeds off this bewildering feeling: there is something else.