

A self-professed tinkerer and toymaker, Neuvel wanted to give his son something tangible to play with, something that could feed the boy’s boundless imagination.

The novel’s plot took shape in early 2013, when Neuvel began building a robot for his young son. With unbending charm, Neuvel describes the road to publishing Sleeping Giants as one speaks of a night spent sleeping beneath the stars: awestruck and in disbelief at one’s own good fortune. Though the novel itself may not be made of celluloid, its DNA has an undeniable foothold in the cinematic. Helmed by debut Canadian novelist Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants is a sci-fi thriller of the highest order, and its breakneck pace, compelling characters, and epistolary narrative structure all fuel the book’s compulsive and rewarding reading experience. Sleeping Giants, the first in a new series called The Themis Files, is one of the most recent examples of this phenomenon-and an exciting and promising one at that. But there are some novels that feel truly filmic in nature, as though one could just as well ingest them in the dark, with a bag of popcorn and the added pleasure of surround sound. The term “cinematic” often gets batted around when describing novels, especially when said books belong to genre-bending categories.
