Kentucky race tracks, 52nd-Street jazz clubs in the 1940s, Billie Holiday in Harlem, summers in Maine and winters in Manhattan- such is the terrain of this lyrical and powerful novel about the past and present, about the life of the streets, about love, and the inner life of an American woman.

The narrator of Sleepless Nights is a woman piecing together her life from scraps. Those scraps include tent meetings in Kentucky, a seedy hotel in New York in the 1940s, a nightclub where Billy Holliday sings. There are newly divorced women taking each other’s emotional temperature and several seductive men - especially a Dutch doctor who conducts his adulteries with domestic coziness. Above all, there is Hardwick’s own unmistakable sensibility, one that delights in startling juxtapositions and the music of the American language.