Sleep Has His House

Sleep Has His House is a novel by Anna Kavan, first published in New York in 1947 under the title The House of Sleep. It mixes autobiography with surrealist experimentation.

The book sets a realistic and semi-autobiographical account of a life alongside sections of subconscious wandering, so the reader moves between two registers rather than through a single continuous narrative.

It is a dark coming-of-age story, and it deals with mental illness and with women who are ill, including patients in psychiatric care. The author herself spent time in psychiatric treatment, a subject that also runs through her other fiction.

In her foreword Kavan writes that life is tension or the result of tension, and that without tension the creative impulse cannot exist, which is the argument the book's structure is meant to demonstrate. The book was not a popular or a critical success when it appeared, and it led to the author being dropped by her publisher. Interest in her work grew after her death in 1968, and this novel is now treated as one of her best.