The Sleeping Beauties. And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

One of the most intriguing and provocative books of the year -- Ian Sample ― Guardian Best Science Books of the Year

To compare any book to a Sacks is unfair, but this one lives up to it. Not because it is alluringly freakish, but because it is so compassionate, and so driven by deep curiosity about the human psyche. I finished it feeling thrillingly unsettled, and wishing there was more. -- James McConnachie ― Sunday Times

O’Sullivan doesn’t offer easy answers. She just shows us, with wonderful compassion and the minimum of judgment, the ways in which people across the world have manifested symptoms that have helped them through – or beyond – painful situations . . . It is, in every sense, mind-blowing. -- Helen Brown ― Daily Telegraph

O'Sullivan travels the world collecting fascinating stories of culture-bound syndromes, which she relays with nuance and sensitivity. -- Alice Robb ― New Statesman

A bracing read, a little like a cold shower on a hot summer’s day. -- Marcus Berkmann ― Daily Mail

A study of diseases that we sometimes say are 'all in the mind', and an explanation of how unfair that characterisation is.

-- Tom Whipple ― The Times Books of the Year

The stories are remarkable. But no less remarkable is O'Sullivan's revelation of the way we all absorb cultural expectations of illness and reject or exhibit symptoms in response . . . Her enlightening and sympathetic book should be required reading for all doctors - and for all patients. -- Wendy Moore ― Literary Review

By making social problems visible on the body, O’Sullivan believes, these conditions allow voiceless people to make
themselves heard. Perhaps this eloquent and convincing book will be the start of making people in authority listen, make change and help.

-- Katy Guest ― Guardian

O’Sullivan’s beautifully written book interweaves the stories of those afflicted in this way around the world, in a travelogue of illness that is ultimately a travelogue of our own irrational, suggestible minds . . . It is a measure of how effective O’Sullivan is at describing the dilemmas and difficulties of treating psychosomatic conditions that, by the end, a visit to a witch doctor begins to feel like the most sensible medical intervention in the book. -- Tom Whipple ― The Times

Each case study peels back the rigid framework of modern medicine and demands that we reframe our understanding of what is and isn't illness. This is a progressive book that doesn't hold back on criticising the dogged diagnostic obsessions of Western medicine. -- Lucy Kehoe ― Geographical

No one doubts that there is something genuinely wrong with these children, yet medicine cannot locate it. O' Sullivan tours the clusters to see if she can do any better. ― Strong Words

In this fascinating book, O’Sullivan makes a case for empathy. ― iNews

In my view the best science writer around – a true descendant of Oliver Sacks. -- Sathnam Sanghera, author of The Boy with the Topknot

Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan has been a consultant in neurology since 2004, first working at The Royal London Hospital and now as a consultant in clinical neurophysiology and neurology at The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, and for a specialist unit based at the Epilepsy Society. She specialises in the investigation of complex epilepsy and also has an active interest in psychogenic disorders. Suzanne’s first book It's All in Your Head, won both the Wellcome Book Prize and the Royal Society of Biology Book Prize and her critically acclaimed Brainstorm was published in 2018