WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024
'A haunting story of conflict with hope at its heart' Daily Mail
'A tour de force - breathtaking in both its scope and intensity' TAYARI JONES
'Shatteringly particular and audaciously universal' ALICE RANDALL
'Excellent... Phillips has brought a little more of this foundational American episode into the light' GUARDIAN
In the wake of the Civil War, 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 by a war veteran known to ConaLee as Papa, mother and daughter are soon swept up in the life of the facility and its characters: the night watchman who lost his eye in battle, the child called Weed, the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen, and the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution. There, far from family and the mountain home they knew, ConaLee and Eliza try to reclaim their lives, and uncover identities lost, hidden or unknown.
Night Watch was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024 on 6 May 2024
Read MorePhillips'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 - GuardianJayne 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 intensityThere 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 alchemyA 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 - Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW