´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
´Beautiful, mournful... Phillips´s artistic conscience won´t let her flinch from this truth, but her generous heart won´t let it be the last word´ WASHINGTON POST
In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt 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 neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.
The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their backstory: 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