The 100 best nonfiction books: No 12 – Awakenings by Oliver Sacks (1973)

Oliver Sacks’s moving account of how, as a doctor in the late 1960s, he revived patients who had been neurologically ‘frozen’ by sleeping sickness reverberates to this day

Among the great books in this series that address the human condition, Awakenings stands out as a profoundly influential medical classic from the 1970s, whose extraordinary narrative continues to reverberate.

Awakenings has inspired short stories, poems, novels and plays, notably Harold Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska. Its central themes – falling asleep, being turned to stone, being awakened, decades later, to a world no longer one’s own – grip the imagination like the best drama, with this difference: the events described by the late Oliver Sacks actually happened.

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