The Reading Bud

Book Blog by Heena Rathore-Pardeshi

Book Review: AWAKE: Notes from the Quiet Hours by S.A. Sterling

Book Details:

Author: S.A. Sterling
Release Date: 26 October 2025
Series:
Genre: Memoir
Format: E-book 
Pages: 70 pages
Publisher:
Blurb:
2:47 a.m. Again.
For two years, she woke in the quiet hours—when the house slept, when the world felt suspended between night and morning. In that stillness, she began to write.
AWAKE is a collection of sixty nights lived in real time: the hum of insomnia, the weight of perimenopause, the questions that surface at 3 a.m. when defenses are down.
These pages don’t offer solutions. They offer presence.
For anyone who’s ever felt alone in the dark hours, this book is company.

Review

Rating: 4 out of 5.

AWAKE: Notes from the Quiet Hours by S.A. Sterling is a gentle, meditative, and moving memoir.

Told through short entries written during real bouts of insomnia, AWAKE reads like a midnight journal, part memoir, part meditation, part conversation with yourself. Author Sterling’s writing covers drifting thoughts from the small rituals of staying awake to ponderings on motherhood, ageing, marriage, memory, loss, and the strange kind of clarity that only arrives when the world is still.

There’s a beautiful rhythm to the entries. Some nights are fleeting with a single page of observation about her hands or the hum of the fridge, while others open like essays about belonging, identity, or the ache of loving people from afar. The language is spare but lyrical; each sentence feels distilled, honest, and unadorned. What makes it powerful is the intimacy, that rare feeling of being trusted with someone’s unfiltered 3 a.m. thoughts.

Author Sterling’s greatest gift as a writer lies in her ability to turn exhaustion into revelation. She writes of menopause, motherhood, migration, and midlife with a rawness that never feels self-pitying. There’s humour here too, and grace in the smallest acts: warming her feet, watching the rain, whispering “you again” to her reflection at 2:38 a.m. By the end, you realise AWAKE is about awareness, about being fully alive even in the quietest, most uncertain moments.


You can also read this review at:

Goodreads


Amazon


I love reading your comments, so please go ahead…

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

I’m Heena

Welcome to The Reading Bud, my cosy corner of the internet dedicated to all things books and authors. Here, I invite you to join me on a journey of discovering under-represented books, independent and small press authors, and all things book with a touch of love and loud purrs. Let’s get Reading!

Book of the Month

Read this captivating story on the adventures and hardships of Frank Knightlite, a man who strives to illuminate darkness with his lantern in search of answers to life’s questions.
You can get it here.
December 2025
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  

Reading is like breathing to me.

Recent Posts

  • Featured Reviewer At NetGalley (NetGalley Blogger Spotlight: The Reading Bud)

    Verbatik Media I’m the featured reviewer at NetGalley for my book blog, The Reading Bud, for their monthly series, Blogger Spotlight, for Mystery & Thriller edition. I was really excited when I received a mail from…

  • Comic Book Review: Apocalypse Meow Meow (ARC)

    Brownie, Apollo, and their ragtag group of strays have raided the grocery store and defeated some very mean mutts–but now they’ve run out of food. So when the crew discovers a nearby Twonkies factory, and all…

  • Book Review: The Forgotten Girls (Louise Rick #7)

    n a forest in Denmark, a ranger discovers the fresh corpse of an unidentified woman. A large scar on one side of her face should make the identification easy, but nobody has reported her missing. After…

  • Book Review: Googolplex

    If you could have anything but the one thing you really wanted, what would you do? Jack is part of a group of colonists traveling to the distant planet Shylock to build themselves a new home.…

  • Book Review: Southern Solstice

    As rich and distinctive as the Lowcountry itself, Southern Solstice presents a clever and charismatic journey of love, heartache, adaptation and emotional fortitude as told through a patina of family heritage. When twenty-four-year-old Larken Devereaux is…