Short description
Sarah Waters, the award-winning author of three novels set in Victorian London, returns with a stunning novel that marks a departure from the 19th century.
Long description
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller. This is the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching ...Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret ...Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover ...Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war. Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances ...Tender, tragic and beautifully poignant, set against the backdrop of feats of heroism both epic and ordinary, here is a novel of relationships that offers up subtle surprises and twists. The Night Watch is thrilling. A towering achievement.
Review
The Night Watch is a truthful, lovely book that needs no conjuring tricks to make you want to read it again' Philip Hensher, Observer 'Brilliantly done... the period detail never overwhelms the simple, passionate human story. It's a tour-de-force of hints, clues and dropped threads' Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday The Night Watch leaves you with the sense of having read something rich and complex pared down with consummate skill by a first-class storyteller into a series of deceptively simple tales of love. Which is a fancy way of saying that Sarah Waters's latest 'Waters secret is her absolute control of the pace - each strand of the plot is paid out carefully at the same speed, no rushing, no favouritism. The characters are given equal weight and time, so that by the end of the first section you're equally grippe ...this outstandingly gifted novelist releases her imagination into her most compelling depiction yet' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times 'It is from this reverse structure that the novel draws its haunting power, forcing the reader to experience time not as an ongoing narrative but as memory. We see, in fact, the beginning of each individual tragedy after we have witnessed it consequence. Carol Ann Duffy, Daily Telegraph 'The Night Watch is sharply and compassionately observed, richly coloured, and compelling to read' Michele Roberts, Independent