Wake Me When It's Over

The first thing you give a sleeper is the year, and you give it the way you'd hand someone a knife — handle first.

In the near-future world of Wake Me When It's Over, the law lets you skip the hard years. A recession, an illness, a grief too heavy to carry — you can freeze yourself and sleep straight through to the other side. And on that other side stands the Waker: the one who peels the orange, cues the song the body remembers, and tells you gently, precisely, how much of your life you lost.

Penelope Nell Aldous is the best Waker at Hesper House, and she lives by two rules she will never break. She will never go under herself. And she will never wake the mother who left her sleeping thirty-six years ago, three floors down, on a date Nell resets and refuses, year after year, to let arrive.

Then a buried clerical crime drops Theo Marsh onto her cradle. He's forty years past his wake-due date, still thirty-eight, still certain his daughter is four years old. Nell has to hand him the truth like a blade turned wrong: his wife is gone, the cure he gambled everything on came and went without him, and the little girl he went under to save is now older than he is — and has spent three decades learning to hate him.

As Theo fights to be known, Nell uncovers something colder than any pod in the house: a quiet, profitable machine built to keep the poor sleeping forever, because the awake simply cost too much. To break it, she'll have to break every rule she's ever lived by, and finally answer the question she's spent her whole life avoiding — who gets to opt out of their own life, and who decides?

Imogen Sayre writes with the hushed precision of a revival ward and the ache of a life measured in lost years. Luminous, humane, and quietly devastating.

Wake up. The truth won't wait.