Night Watch: A Novel

4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars | 3,895 ratings

Price: 15.75

Last update: 01-02-2025


About this item

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR From one of our most accomplished novelists, a mesmerizing story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War—and a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds

"A tour de force."—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They 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 world. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.

The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their story: 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 mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan 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 stunning chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath.


Top reviews from the United States

  • Woodstock
    5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful
    Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2024
    Creative story line of devastation and renaissance. The imagery and characters crystal clear, vivid and alive. This is well worth the rear and enjoyment
  • Steven E. Sanderson
    4.0 out of 5 stars Darkness visible
    Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2024
    There is a genre of war and frontier fiction that is as dark as a well. Sebastian Barry, John Ehle, John Williams, Kevin Barry are all noted practitioners. Not to mention Cormac McCarthy. These books are written in a writerly prose, sprinkled with period-specific words and turns of phrase. The best of them -- and this book surely is one -- evoke the darkness and violence of the 19th century in such an unrelenting way that the reader sometimes feels suffocated. Night Watch has all that, along with a very difficult beginning and scrambled chronology. Still, this story of a girl and her ersatz family, trying to survive the Civil War and its aftermath, is affecting and in ways beautiful. I would say it's testament to the human spirit, if it weren't for the fact that most of the humans creating the tableau are engaged in a national murder/suicide from 1861-65 and plagued by its horrible nightmares for the rest of their lives. Beautifully, beautifully written by a wonderful talent.
  • Seán Anthony Higgins
    5.0 out of 5 stars Felt like lost family history…
    Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2024
    Jayne Anne Phillips’ brilliant novel has raised many questions for me, aroused my curiosity about my own ancestors who arrived from Ireland at the very start of The Civil War.
    My first relatives to touch soil in America - at pre-Ellis Island Castle Rock - were deeply impacted by the war. The Lawler family had survived “the Great Famine” (more aptly named the Great Starvation) and arrived in New York in September, 1861. Two parents and five children. The two oldest boys (still in their late teens) were conscripted upon arrival. One month to the day, the eldest, John, was killed in the 2nd Battle of Falls Church (Virginia). His younger brother Andrew survived the amputation and cauterization of one arm. Beyond that I know nothing.
    I have a copy of the last letter John wrote home, and it is truly bittersweet to see one’s own traits in that of an ancestor: in my case I appear to have the same hyper-loquacity expressed in John’s 5-page+ letter (he filled the margins with his love and best wishes for several people, including one young woman they’d met on the boat over.
    Ms. Phillips’ opus has lit the long-dry fuse of the keg of powder I’ve been sitting upon for years - I wrote one worthless novel to earn a Master of Fine Arts in Writing, and now I plan to begin the digging, and the writing, to bring my family’s experience of this abominable war to some sort of fruition or closure…
  • Steven M. Anthony
    3.0 out of 5 stars Author Goes a Little Overboard with the Gauzy, Ethereal Prose
    Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2024
    I read a lot of science fiction, historical fiction and biographies, but from time to time, I like to read some of the more recent Pulitzer Prize nominees for fiction. That is how I came across this book.

    This is a story set in multiple time lines surrounding the American Civil War. It essentially follows an extended family from its roots at a South Carolina plantation, to the upper ridges of the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. It is a compelling story, and contains some outstanding scenes, well presented.

    It also contains many pages of ethereal, gauzy prose, of the kind much celebrated by Pulitzer Prize judges; a little too much for my taste. It also contains several coincidences so unlikely as to appear absurd and detract from the story.

    It is somewhat reminiscent of Cold Mountain, in setting and even plot element, but in my opinion, Charles Frazier does it far better.
  • Eat to Live Diet Reloaded
    5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent story
    Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2024
    This book was difficult to get into initially, but soon I couldn’t put it down. The characters stay with you after you finish reading.
  • T. P. Casey
    4.0 out of 5 stars Art Expands Understanding of Crucial History
    Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2024
    Night Watch, a novel by Jayne Anne Phillips, this month won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It tells the story of women and anguish during the American Civil War and its aftermath, of mothers and surrogate mothers and widows caught in the killing of their husbands and children in battle. It is finally a story about a driven will to survive, to the breaking point, horrors that visit their lives. Men are not portrayed propitiously in this narrative.

    Phillips creates a specific reality for each of her characters and mixes their historical situations effectively. Husbands conscripted for war are lost to fighting. Families are sundered, in spirit or in fact. Without a male protector in isolated precincts, rape is a real fear, and vulnerability to theft a fact of life. Children are exploited and abused or rejected by mothers as spoiled by forceful parentage. Night Watch uncovers a world where women, codified by law as second-class citizens, must depend on men who shirk their duties and responsibilities. Laws promulgated to address injustice toward women and to protect their rights as citizens would come later. In 1874, the year of post-Civil War reconstruction used by Phillips, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded, and the political drive to outlaw alcohol commenced. In 1919 prohibition was ratified as the18th constitutional amendment in response to alcohol abuse disrupting domestic culture.

    Night Watch has a well-researched background for a fundamentally serious story on a serious topic set in America’s most serious history, the Civil War, and its aftermath. One fault of the narrative is an almost total lack of humor. Another is that the resolution suffers slightly but manifestly from contrivance. Against other virtues, this might be quibbling. In 1874 a woman at the edge of sanity is taken to a lunatic asylum because of horrifying circumstances and abuse. This is brilliantly and believably portrayed. Daughter ConaLee accompanies her mother, in a subterfuge that allows acceptance into the asylum, Eliza, now neurotically speechless and under the name of Miss Janet, finds sanctuary and safety. And more satisfying discoveries will eventually unfold.

    There is a buried intensity in how Jayne Anne Phillips writes. The Pulitzer Prize is focused on talent. Her sentences are sharp, paired; her scenes are vivid. Behind an obvious effort of research and story is a determination to serve art and life. This artistic fortitude makes the foundation for her entire novel.

    Though Phillips’s evocation of men as cowardly and morally evasive can weary as too unidirectional, her emphasis is historically accurate. She has a point. And she is writing history, not re-writing it. Using fiction as art’s way of expanding dimension and perspective, she speaks to what has become the clichéd, ignored, or even abandoned plight of women in our society. Her representation of what happened to her fictional characters in a carefully reconstructed account of a particular time resonates truth. The frangible nature of chance and fate for women during a war that took from them their men and boys is the undergirding theme of Night Watch. Jayne Anne Phillips has written her best novel so far, and it will stand.

    --Tom Casey
  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars The Night Watch is intelligently written and remarkably detailed.
    Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2024
    Beautifully written, this tale of a families survival through hardship and war a breath of fresh insight into mountain living. I highly recommend this book.
  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars great read
    Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2024
    Interesting story weaving history and complex characters. Highlights the trauma and generational impacts of war, long after a war is won or lost.

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