Book Review: The Sleeper

Title: The Sleeper

Author: Holly Seddon

Publisher: Atria Books

Publication Date: November 17, 2026

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I love a book that makes you sit with an uncomfortable "what if," and Holly Seddon's alternate-reality thriller does exactly that. Librarian Maya boards her usual sleeper train from Edinburgh to London, but when lightning strikes the carriage she wakes into a London she doesn't recognize — one where the Berlin Wall never fell, the Cold War never ended, and Britain is an authoritarian Soviet state. Her husband Arthur is missing, a stranger is living in her flat, and because her parents never had their gap-year kiss by the wall, Maya herself was never born into this version of the world. Alone and adrift, she falls in with a resistance movement built largely around librarians like her, and gets sent undercover into the government itself, desperate to find her way home and the people she loves along the way.

It's part Cold War spy thriller, part time-travel science fiction, and the blend mostly works, even if the pacing sags somewhat. What I loved most was the doubling of Arthur — one version in Maya's real timeline, one in this Soviet-London reality — set against a single Maya who has to become someone else entirely just to survive.
That contrast does a lot of quiet work, and it's where the book's emotional core really lives. The lightning-strike-as-portal device asks for a fair bit of suspension of disbelief, but I was willing to grant it for the story it unlocks. I did find myself occasionally frustrated by how long Maya goes without picking up the language or customs of the world she's landed in — it stretched credulity a bit for someone this resourceful.

Where the book shines is in its small, telling details of a world with less — parents actually holding their children's hands and talking to them instead of staring at phones, kids clutching dolls and rattles instead of screens, a boy playing spy with real gusto because that's the entertainment he's got. It's a clever way of making the reader question what our own abundance and freedom have cost us. And I loved that libraries end up as the story's literal safe haven — as someone who thinks of libraries as sanctuaries myself, that felt exactly right.

A big thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

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Book Review: This Jury is Guilty

Title: This Jury is Guilty

Author: Laurie Blake

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark

Publication Date: November 3, 2026

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I went into this one expecting a tight, claustrophobic thriller in the vein of Twelve Angry Men, and in some ways that's exactly what I got—just with a lot more moving parts than I bargained for.

Hollywood's biggest star, Danny Scott, stands trial for the attempted murder of his wife, starlet Hope Harrison, and the twelve sequestered jurors deciding his fate turn out to be hiding as many secrets as the defendant. The premise promises that everyone is guilty of something, and the book delivers on that front—maybe too well.

My biggest issue was sheer volume of characters. And
I never fully bought the central conceit that several jurors could engineer their way onto this specific panel—it's a big ask of the reader's suspense of disbelief, and the book doesn't earn it. The deliberation scenes, which should have been the tense heart of the novel, ended up feeling off, and the verdict landed strangely rather than satisfyingly.

The book was engaging, but I just wish I'd had someone to root for. Neither Danny nor Hope earned my sympathy, and with a cast where everyone's guilty of something, there's no one left to anchor the story emotionally. It's a twisty, ambitious locked-room thriller that ultimately buckles a little under its own scope. Interesting, but not quite believable.

A big thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark and NetGalley for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. 

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