Philippa is a tonic even if you're not her patient

Pure book joy. Deep thinking made digestible & doled up with lashings of wit. How old habits hold us back. Perfect Xmas present.

So smart and interesting!

If you've ever wondered whether therapy is for you, Mrs Grayson Perry's entertaining, insightful guide will give you an idea (...) This is a story about connection, honesty and opening up emotionally - things many of us find difficult. Charmingly illustrated by daughter Flo

Curl up with a fireside read (and) swot up with psychology

a gem (...) funny, engaging, enlightening

Perry offers a digestible, droll guide to the therapeutic process

This can help many of us to understand the therapeutic process better

winningly illustrated (...) absolutely fascinating and very funny

How can a book about a sensual deprivation be so sensuous and so full? Gritty with particulars, concrete and substantial even when it is most philosophical and far-reaching. I loved reading it before I fell asleep every night – it seemed to give my sleep resonance and poetry. What a beautiful book.

The Shapeless Unease captures the essence of fractious emotions – anxiety, fear, grief, rage – in prose so elegant, so luminous, it practically shines from the page. Harvey is a hugely talented writer, and this is a book to relish.

This book felt enormous to me, mercurial, devastating, seeming to grapple with the nature of everything in a manner so compelling it is impossible not to be swept along. A book to return to again and again.

I have valued Samantha Harvey's company through her memoir of insomnia, The Shapeless Unease. Harvey's description of not sleeping as a kind of assault feels utterly true.

A small miracle of a book. Reading it feels like its own kind of lucid dream … You would imagine a book written in such circumstances would have a hazy quality, but in fact its clarity of expression is startling. It's a fireworks display. It's also a profound meditation on language and loss and time, and on how we construct ourselves through stories. And it's painful. And it's beautiful. And I love it. Samantha Harvey is the most exceptionally gifted of authors, and here she demonstrates that she can literally do anything.

I am still shuddering, almost, from the beautiful, beautiful writing and its broken, angry, vibrant demand – a dare almost – to accept life, and brave it, with all it brings.

A creative account of a life with little sleep… Readers looking for their own cure will instead find an erudite companion to help them through the dark times.

It's funny, sad, wry, always worrying away at the mystery of sleep and its absence and finding endless new angles so that the whole has something of the quality of those waking dreams that haunt the insomniac and are her private country.

A slim, intense memoir about her own year-long experience of nocturnal unrest… a torture Harvey describes with a combination of desperation, wry humour and — despite the scarcity she is subjected to — a deeply felt sense of life’s abundance… [her] prose…glows off the page: an exacting inquisition of the self leading to imperfect peace.

[Harvey is] brilliant on words and the nature of writing.

[With The Shapeless Unease] Harvey has certainly proved that insomnia, as much as any of the more obviously nasty diseases, might be as worthy a subject of literature as love, battle or jealousy…her book rises to that level.

[A] bravely exposing deep dive into the emotional murk of her [Havey’s] restless mind….[it] reveals…the irresistible writerly impulse to pin experience to the page.

[The Shapeless Unease] reads like a dream sequence… Even reading this made me feel dizzy… [Harvey is] a vigorous, eloquent writer… she conveys the way sleeplessness takes you into the death zone of life.

Mesmerising…at times, bitingly funny… [The Shapeless Unease is] an engrossing portrait of the fragility of identity and coherency in the grip of insomnia. I hadn’t read Harvey before this, but her facility with language here captivated me and I’ll be seeking out her novels next.

Urgent and full of arresting images and insights.

[The Shapeless Unease] is littered with sharp insights expressed in exquisitely lucid prose but is as amorphous as its title suggests.

It’s a claustrophobic, enlightening, moving, existential treatise on sleep, insomnia and death. And it’s funny, too.

I wish I had saved The Shapeless Unease to read in isolation but Samantha Harvey’s book about insomnia, time, death and so many unknowable things is a blessing to have in lonely times. It is a profound and stunning book but funny, too.

A beautiful, jagged little book about insomnia and so many unknowable things: life and death, Buddhism, and how language alters our thinking. But I was most struck by its form and structure.

[Samantha Harvey's] cerebral, startlingly clear account of somehow pulling through [from insomnia] carries an electric charge and meditates on not only the mystery of sleep but also writing, swimming and dreams.

[The Shapeless Unease] is beautifully crafted and its achievement makes itself more apparent on a second reading.

A masterpiece, so good I can hardly breathe. I'm completely floored by it.

This book seems appropriately messy-haired and wild-eyed... Anyone who has lain awake the night before a big test will recognize such manic flourishes. Harvey captures the 4 a.m. bloom of magical thinking; stories proliferate within stories... To read Harvey is to grow spoiled on gorgeous phrases.