book cover of Night Watch
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Night Watch

(2023)
A novel by

 
 
Awards
2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
2023 National Book Award for Fiction (longlist)



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


Genre: Literary Fiction

Praise for this book

"A lovely piece of work . . . Night Watch is another of Jayne Anne Phillips's intimate revelatory creations." - Dorothy Allison

"It's hard to know what to praise first - Jayne Anne Phillips' signature beautiful sentences, the compelling scenes of battle and their ravaged aftermath, the fascinating portrayal of Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride's 'moral treatment' method for the mentally ill, or the vivid depiction of the people and land of West Virginia in the 1860s and 70s. Night Watch takes a highly deserved place among important novels about war and its legacy." - Alice Elliott Dark

"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

"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

"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


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