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THE SWOON

A science-fiction survival thriller

THE SWOON

Adam Roberts

The adults are asleep.
The children are running out of time.

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Dwayne keeps watch beside his sleeping mother while Stone examines a small stone in the doorway.

A family in a sleeping world

His mom won’t wake.
His sister needs him.

When the adults fall into an unbreakable sleep, Shawton’s children wake to a town they must run themselves.

Sixteen-year-old Dwayne Garland has a more immediate problem: keeping his mother alive and looking after his younger sister, Stone.

He learns what he can from medical books. Around him, some kids care for their parents. Others abandon them. The power fails. Food begins to rot. Help isn’t coming.

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An abandoned birthday cake with candles marking a seventeenth birthday.

The next birthday changes everything

Seventeen.
Then sleep.

The Swoon wasn’t a one-time event.

As the survivors turn seventeen, they fall asleep too. Every birthday takes another person the children have learned to depend on.

Dwayne searches for an explanation. Rhianna tries to hold the town together. But neither can stop time—and their own birthdays are getting closer.

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Rhianna addresses the children of Shawton.

Screen adaptation

For film
and television

The logline

When everyone seventeen and over falls into an unwakeable sleep, sixteen-year-old Dwayne Garland must care for his comatose mother and younger sister while helping a town of children survive without adults—and uncover the cause before his seventeenth birthday puts him to sleep too.

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Open reference books on a table in a deserted, sunlit library.

For film and television

Growing up has
a deadline.

  • A birthday becomes a threat. A familiar milestone turns into a deadline every character can see coming.
  • A town becomes a society in miniature. Duty, faith and the temptation of total freedom divide the children left in charge.
  • A family gives the catastrophe its stakes. Dwayne’s care for his mother and autistic younger sister, Stone, makes survival intimate and practical.
  • A mystery drives the story forward. Keeping the town alive is only the beginning. Dwayne needs to understand what has happened before it happens to him.
  • From Adam Roberts. A three-time Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee and winner of the BSFA and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards.
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The novella

Read the book

THE SWOON by Adam Roberts

A sleeping mother. A town of children. A future that ends at seventeen.

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About Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is the award-winning author of Salt, Gradisil and Yellow Blue Tibia. A three-time Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

The Swoon by Adam Roberts. Cover by Sonny & Biddy.