Night Watch: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024
About this audiobook
'Breathtaking in both its scope and intensity' TAYARI JONES
'Shatteringly particular and audaciously universal' ALICE RANDALL
A mesmerising story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in a mental asylum in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War.
In 1874, in the wake of the war, trauma haunts civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. 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's entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their lives. There, far from family, a beloved neighbour, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.
The twin horrors of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their history: 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 mystery behind the man they call the Night Watch; the 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 brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds and a stunning chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath.
Night Watch was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024 on 6 May 2024
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About the author
Jayne Anne Philips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of six novels, including Night Watch, Quiet Dell, Lark And Termite, MotherKind, Shelter, and Machine Dreams, and two story collections, Fast Lanes, and Black Tickets, a debut that influenced a generation of writers. Twice nominated for the National Book Award, and twice a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. Awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, Phillips is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Her work has been translated into twelve languages and has appeared in Granta, Harper's, The New York Times and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. See information and text source photographs at her website, www.jayneannephillips.com.
