Dan Chaon

Stay Awake: Stories Dan Chaon Unabridged edition

In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection - and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations. A father's life is upended by his son's night terrors - and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of "empty-nest syndrome." They exist in a place by the window late at night when the streets are empty and the world appears to be quiet. But you are up, unable to sleep. So you stay awake.