This is a long audiobook (over 25 hours) and due to a glitch with my audible not synching properly between the different devices that I listened to it on, I must have listened to about 40 hours of it! This was actually not a bad thing, because there are a lot of characters and a lot is going on and often I only picked up on things on the second (or even third) listening of a certain passage. Also, I was never bored even with the overlaps. The narrator, a woman with a lovely southern American accent is a joy to listen to, and brings the characters and plot to life really well. The book is set in the recent past (just pre-covid, I guess) in the small town of Dooling, West Virginia. The appearance of a mysterious woman in town coincides with a world-wide phenomenon where all female people who fall asleep are covered in a weird fibrous cocoon and enter a sort of sleeping coma. If anyone tries to remove the cocoon the women rouse long enough to react with extreme violence before returning to their sleep. We discover that their conscious minds are inhabiting a sort of parallel town of Dooling in a new society without any men. As more women fall asleep, the two societies polarise with the male Earth erupting into violence and mayhem while the female place gets on with life peacefully.
The book was a lot of fun to listen to, although it paints a really bad picture of men, with most of the male characters being total toe-rags, and most of the women bearing the scar of systematic male abuse. The ending was interesting and satisfying.
Sarah Wray Writer 