Critics' Opinion:
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Published Apr 2006
464 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A novel of relationships set in 1940s London that brims with vivid historical detail, thrilling coincidences, and psychological complexity, by the author of the Booker Prize finalist Fingersmith.
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit liasons, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of Londoners: three women and a young man with a past - whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in ways that are surprising and not always known to them. In wartime London, the women work - as ambulance drivers, ministry clerks, and building inspectors. There are feats of heroism, epic and quotidian, and tragedies both enormous and personal.
"Waters's sharply drawn page-turner doesn't quite equal the work of literary greats who've already mapped out WWII-era London. But she matches any of them with her scene of two women on the verge of an affair during a nighttime bombing raid..." - PW.
"Night Watch is structurally more complex than her previous works, but the astonishing period detail and focus on the forgotten corners of society remain." - Library Journal.
"A cut below this author's superb earlier books, but very much worth reading." - Kirkus.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and has been an associate lecturer with the Open University.
She has written five novels: Tipping the Velvet, which won the Betty Trask Award; Affinity, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday /John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Fingersmith, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and won the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger; The Night Watch, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize; and The Little Stranger, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the South Bank Show Literature Award.
She was included in Granta's prestigious list ...
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