Paperback | 72 pages | November 2021 | ISBN: 978-1-8381891-3-6
A sensation crept over her, she had the strange feeling that something, or someone was causing her son’s distress: a presence in the darkness…
Elin, Mark and baby Padarn move into their first house together – a house bought unusually cheap – as Mark relocates them in order to start a new job. Lonely and trapped in an increasingly volatile and disquieting marriage, Elin’s world begins to unravel in self-doubt and paranoia: is something else visiting her baby at night, keeping him awake? Soon, a series of terrible secrets crawl out from between the cracks.
An unsettling contemporary ghost story by the winner of the Ghastling Novella Prize, this is an extremely tense and haunting tale that promises to have the reader riveted and turning the pages to the very end.
“Deep, visceral terror resides within this story. Gramich accumulates unnerving detail to build to an horrific climax. A deeply unsettling and innovative update on the classic ghost story.”
— Lucie McKnight Hardy
“Set against the claustrophobic backdrop of the pandemic, Sleep Training is an unsettling mediation on new motherhood, perception, and selfhood. It is at once frightening and thoughtful, eerie and compelling, and leaves the reader questioning who and what can be trusted.”
— Rebecca F. John
“From this novella’s opening scene of exhaustion tainting the young parents’ arrival at their new home, there’s a creeping sense of wrongness that could just be dismissed as sleep deprivation or paranoia. The final horrors ‒ no longer inside the mind, now inside the room ‒ cut the reader as sharply as a wielded knife.”
— Carly Holmes
About the Author
ELUNED GRAMICH is a writer and translator from west Wales. Her memoir of her time in Hokkaido, Japan, Woman Who Brings the Rain, won the inaugural New Welsh Writing Awards in 2015 and went on to be shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year She lives in Cardiff with her husband and toddler.
Others Were Haunted By
The Ghastling 