The Sleeping Beauties

More about the book

In Sweden, refugee children fall asleep for months and years at a time. In upstate New York, high-school students develop contagious seizures. In the US embassy in Cuba, employees complain of headaches and memory loss after hearing strange noises in the night. Inspired by a poignant encounter with the sleeping refugee children of Sweden, Wellcome Prize-winning neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan travels the world to hear remarkable stories about other 'mystery' illnesses. From a derelict post-Soviet mining town in Kazakhstan, to the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua via an oil town in Texas, to the hear of the Maria Mountains in Colombia, she meets a fascinating array of people, all the while attempting to unravel the complex question: who gets to define what is and what isn't an illness?