Night Watch
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024
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Night Watch
Narrated by:
Karissa Vacker, Maggi-Meg Reed, Theo T. Stockman
Buy Now for $26.99
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Narrated by:
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Karissa Vacker
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Maggi-Meg Reed
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Theo T. Stockman
About this listen
'Breathtaking in both its scope and intensity' TAYARI JONES
'Shatteringly particular and audaciously universal' ALICE RANDALL
A mesmerising story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in a mental asylum in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War.
In 1874, in the wake of the war, trauma haunts civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee and her mother, Eliza, who hasn't spoken in more than a year, arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital's entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their lives. There, far from family, a beloved neighbour, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.
The twin horrors of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their history: their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee's father, who left for the war and never returned. Meanwhile in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother's maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility - the mystery behind the man they call the Night Watch; the child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.
Epic, enthralling and meticulously crafted, Night Watch is a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds and a stunning chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath.
Night Watch was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024 on 6 May 2024©2023 Jayne Anne Phillips
Critic Reviews
Phillips's depiction of a ravaged world in which so many have lost their way or had it stolen from them, both physically and mentally, feels true to the profoundly destabilising nature of her subject...With this excellent novel, Phillips has brought a little more of this foundational American episode into the light
A haunting story of conflict with hope at its heart
Beautiful, mournful... Carefully and engrossingly crafted... The good suffer equally with the bad. Phillips's artistic conscience won't let her flinch from this truth, but her generous heart won't let it be the last word. She leaves readers with a rueful yet doggedly hopeful maxim that could easily serve as an epigraph for Night Watch as a whole: 'Endurance was strength'
Intricately plotted... As Phillips shifts between the two periods and among her various characters' perspectives [...] she examines ideas about identity, rebirth, and lingering trauma
Jayne Anne Phillips is a brilliant artist working at the height of her powers. Word by word, and line by line, there is no one better. This novel lives where a startling imagination meets scrupulous research: Night Watch is a tour de force - breathtaking in both its scope and intensity (Tayari Jones, author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE)
There is a luminous beauty in Phillips's prose. Whether it is the dark interiors of war - which have become her forte - or the equally complex and fraught lives of so-called 'ordinary' people, Phillips brings these theaters of peace and loss, death and transcendence together with a remarkable alchemy (Ken Burns, filmmaker)
A superb meditation on broken families in post-Civil War West Virginia . . . The bruised and turbulent postbellum era comes alive in Phillips's page-turning affair
Expect coincidences and convolutions . . . Phillips pulls them off with gorgeous prose, attention to detail, and masterful characters. Haunting storytelling and a refreshing look at history
A profound meditation on identity, empathy, sanity, daughter-love, nature, and the Civil War, Night Watch will leave you shook and sustained. This novel delivers fictional reckoning that makes way for the potential of real-world reconciliation by delivering complex and necessary testimony and confession. Weaving photographs and fragments of non-fiction prose into an intimate family story, Night Watch is at once shatteringly particular and audaciously universal. Jayne Anne Phillips arrives at the crowning achievement of an extraordinary career (Alice Randall, author of BLACK BOTTOM SAINTS)
Jayne Anne Phillips is a wonderfully gifted storyteller, and few contemporary writers can match the lyricism of her prose, but in this marvelous new novel, largely set in a factual nineteenth-century asylum, she achieves even more: history and imagination merge, and she gives the past a living pulse (Ron Rash, author of THE CARETAKER)
Strong characters
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Having said all that, I think the book has a real identity problem. Although I know it’s seen as a masterpiece, but I believe it suffers from not being able to define itself as a war novel, historical novel, romance, or magical realism.
Award winning, but not for everyone.
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