Beggars in Spain

In the year 2008, thanks to a stunning scientific breakthrough, Chicago millionaire Roger Camden and his wife Elizabeth produce the perfect child—a genetically modified daughter, Leisha, who is beautiful, extraordinarily intelligent…and who will never require sleep. She is one of the first twenty so-called “Sleepless” in a world that will initially treat them as interesting anomalies…and, later, as objects of envy and scorn.

As the decades pass, the Sleepless population increases and prospers—and Leisha grows to become one of the ablest legal minds in America. But the heightened abilities and a shattered revelation about the near-immortality of “her kind” has inflamed the wrath of the nation’s Sleeper majority—spawning political repression and shocking mob violence that drives the Sleepless en masse from a society that rejects them…and, ultimately, from the Earth itself.

But Leisha Camden remains behind—outcast from both worlds, yet unwilling to forfeit her rightful place in the community of man. Meanwhile, aboard an orbiting colony called Sanctuary, a new generation of genetically engineered super-children is born—the foundation of a brilliant and bitter Sleepless leader’s conspiracy of freedom…and revenge.