After a mysterious, silent child is found abandoned on the beach
clutching a handheld video game, residents and tourists alike find
themselves utterly unable to sleep. Exhaustion impairs judgment,
delusions become hysteria, and mob rule explodes into shocking violence.
Told from three perspectives: Chief of Police Mays tries to keep order,
teenaged tourist Cort and her friends compete in a dangerous social
media contest for the most hours awake, while local physician and former
Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Sam Carlson battles his guilt over a student's
suicide and the blurriness of his own insomnia, to try to treat the
sleepless--until he and the child must flee the violent mob that blames
the child for the epidemic.