RT @HarperPerennial: HAPPY PUB DAY to this RIPPED-FROM-THE-HEADLINES thriller novel by @AlexMarwood1 that you won’t want to miss! La Kas… https://t.co/BmPs6vgEb0 Despite being one of those people who drift off with annoying ease, Alice Vernon does not sleep soundly, she sleeps “strangely”. Ever since childhood, she’s been prone to “parasomnias” – sleep disturbances that include nightmares, sleepwalking and ghostly hallucinations. In a discourse fired by lively inquiry and vivid personal anecdote, she looks to art, literature and science to demonstrate the profound effect these eerie and surprisingly common nocturnal states have had on the human imagination. It’s a fascinating debut – just don’t read it at bedtime. Looking for Trouble This was exactly the type of book I wish I had access to when I first started getting sleep paralysis. Night Terrors is Alice Vernon's attempt in demystifying and normalising the terrors around sleep, analysing how they've been interpreted and misinterpreted throughout history, while encouraging us to tell our own stories. Vernon's own testimony and experience with parasomnias is sprinkled throughout the book, and I want to applaud her bravery for being so open about such a vulnerable topic. Apart from interesting discussions about various parasomnias, Alice has a variety of annecdotes that range from hilarious, creepy, and even some that actually made me cry. Icon Books is an independent publisher of thought-provoking non-fiction. We publish science, history, politics, philosophy, psychology, humour and much else besides

Reviewer Carolina Ciucci Interviews Alice Vernon, Author of Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep and the Stories We Tell about It When I saw this book at my local bookstore, I knew I had to get it. I was instantly drawn to the cover, and if you're not familiar with the image, it's the The Nightmare by Swedish painter Henry Fuseli.Now a lecturer in Creative Writing, Vernon set out to understand the history, science and culture of these strange and haunting experiences. Night Terrors, her startling and vivid debut, examines the history of our relationship with bad dreams: how we've tried to make sense of and treat them, from some decidedly odd 'cures' like magical 'mare-stones', to research on how video games might help people rewrite their dreams. Along the way she explores the Salem Witch Trials and sleep paralysis, Victorian ghost stories, and soldiers' experiences of PTSD. By directly confronting her own strange and frightening nights for the first time, Vernon encourages us to think about the way troubled sleep has impacted our imaginations. Senior commissioning editor Kiera Jamison bought world English rights for both books from Donald Winchester. Icon will publish both titles in autumn 2022.

This week, we’re here with Alice Vernon, a woman long fascinated by what happens to our brains during sleep. Taking that interest one step further led Alice to begin research for her new book, Night Terrors, and that deep dive uncovered centuries worth of literature and analysis, some of it mind boggling. Sleep is a hot topic these days. Popular science books promise to uncover why we do it at all, while exploring its importance for a healthy life. Self-help manuals seek to teach the art of sleeping well amidst the stresses of modern life. Wearable devices and mobile apps monitor quality and quantity, nudging users to make adjustments to their bedtime routines. Meanwhile, last summer’s heatwave produced endless variations of top tips for ensuring the right amount of sleep in sweltering temperatures. I think reading about them will certainly help. Before I started to conduct research for the book, I had so many misconceptions of my own—I had no idea that when I saw spiders all over my bed, for example, it was something called a hypnopompic hallucination. The more we learn about and understand what is really happening when we experience these strange sleep states, the less weird or embarrassed we’ll feel for having them in the first place. You explain that some parasomnias (such as sleepwalking and lucid dreaming) are romanticized, while others (hallucinations, sleep paralysis, night terrors) are more stigmatized. Could you elaborate on this? What do you think fuels this difference? We are mysterious creatures, to others and ourselves. How to explain the creative brainstorms, harebrained schemes, and shudder-causing evil thoughts that suddenly appear in our normally quite sane brains? Why did evolution provide us with consciousness? And, pray tell, WTF are dreams? Night Terrors is an in-depth examination of the complicated relationship that we have with our sleep, how we try to understand it, and even try to "cure" it of some of its unwanted traits.Now a lecturer in Creative Writing, Vernon set out to understand the history, science and culture of these strange and haunting experiences. NIGHT TERRORS, her startling and vivid debut, examines the history of our relationship with bad dreams: how we’ve tried to make sense of and treat them, from some decidedly odd ‘cures’ like magical ‘mare-stones’, to research on how video games might help people rewrite their dreams. Along the way she explores the Salem Witch Trials and sleep paralysis, Victorian ghost stories, and soldiers’ experiences of PTSD. By directly confronting her own strange and frightening nights for the first time, Vernon encourages us to think about the way troubled sleep has impacted our imaginations. Ever since she was a child, her nights have been haunted by nightmares of a figure from her adolescence, sinister hallucinations and episodes of sleepwalking. These are known as 'parasomnias'– and they're surprisingly common. I'm not much of a nonfiction reader, and if you are the same, don't be put off. This book reads like fiction, and doesn't have that dry, clinical feel that puts you to sleep. I found this book to be incredibly fascinating and yet, incredibly relatable. When aspiring foreign correspondent Virginia Cowles turned up to report on the Spanish civil war in 1937, she was a 26-year-old Boston debutante in heels. Over the next few years she would report from Paris as it fell to the Nazis, London on the first day of the blitz, and Berlin on the day Germany invaded Poland. She liked to say that her only qualification was curiosity, but as this timely reissue of her bestselling 1941 memoir proves, she also had courage, tenacity and a flair for observation. A penchant for name-dropping only makes it more irresistible.