When The Sleeper Awakes is about a man who sleeps for two hundred and three years, waking up in a completely transformed London, where, because of compound interest on his bank accounts, he has become the richest man in the world. The main character awakes to see his dreams realised, and the future revealed to him in all its horrors and malformities. Graham fell into a deep and abiding sleep in the 1890s -- and woke, centuries later, having hardly aged. He has been the famous Sleeper for centuries, and has come, by inheritance and the compounding of interest, to own the world. The people adore him -- and their masters (who rule in his name) do not want him breathing. . . . "Nothing is more striking about Mr. Wells . . . than his power of lending freshness and vitality to some well-worn formula of fiction." --The Spectator