The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

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, a 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 a thrilling and towering literary achievement.

Waters, Sarah: - Sarah Waters has written six novels: Tipping the Velvet (1998, Betty Trask Award); Affinity (1999, Somerset Maugham Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award); Fingersmith (2002, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, and winner of the South Bank Show Award for Literature and the CWA Historical Dagger); The Night Watch (2006, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize); The Little Stranger (2009, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the South Bank Show Literature Award) and The Paying Guests (2014, shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction). She was included in Granta's prestigious list of 'Best of Young British Novelists 2003', and in the same year was voted Author of the Year at the British Book Awards and the BA Conference, and won the Waterstones Author of the Year Award. In April 2015 she joined the Council of the Society of Authors.