WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024 '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.
