An evening in conversation with Joanne Harris

Sleepers in the Snow is an astonishing, original and powerful novel of love, loss,

mystery and dementia, from bestseller Joanne Harris.

Out on the moor, in the snow, a house stands beneath a pylon.

It is a house full of memories, and full of old things. And, in the dark, when the pylon sings in the wind, it is a

house full of ghosts and fading memories…

The house, Kirkhill, has a new occupant - just moved in, fresh from a bitter divorce and looking for a fresh start.

The moor is the perfect place for it: isolated, beautiful in the changing seasons, peaceful, and with just enough of

the previous owners belongings that it's a perfectly self-contained and cosy home.

Only as the nights start to draw in, and the weather takes a turn, so does the house. The cosy isolation becomes

menacing, animals begin acting strangely, and it seems someone could be watching the house…and the diaries

of the previous owners begin to reveal a terrible tragedy which befell Kirkhill - one which its new occupant may

be unable to escape…

Notes from Joanne. 

‘I wrote the first draft of Sleepers very fast, over the course of about three months, which is the time the story spans. It begins as I began it, in the autumn of 2024, and ends in the middle of winter. My father had died that summer, after years of ill-health and dementia, and after his death, my mother, who had cared for him at home, quickly and efficiently swept the house of all trace of him. Clothes, diaries, photographs – even his wedding ring – were disposed of overnight, so that no sign of him remained. She didn’t want a funeral. I recovered a box of his things that had been marked for disposal, including the ring, the book he’d been reading (a French thriller, which he’d been re-starting over and over for years) and the little notebooks he used every day to document his life – 

trivial things, including lists of names and words that he wanted to remember. There were several years’ worth of these notebooks, maybe a dozen in all; all closely written in French and illustrating his gradual decline. These books, both poignant and mundane, inspired some of the entries in Arthur’s journal. Later, I found that some of the books had disappeared: I searched the house from top to bottom, but to date, the notebooks are still missing. I sometimes wonder if they disappeared from the real world in order to stay in the story. In any case, the

theme of things disappearing (and sometimes reappearing unexpectedly, and in unsettling circumstances) became a recurring theme in the book, as did the themes of lost memory, lost love, lost time. Is it a ghost story? I don’t know. There are certainly ghosts in there. But who is living and who is dead? And does it matter? You decide.’

Joanne Harris (OBE, FRSL) is the author of twenty novels, three cookbooks and

many short stories. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an honorary Fellow of St Catharines College, Cambridge, was Chair of the Society of Authors between 2020 and 2024, and in 2022 was awarded an OBE by the Queen.