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.