PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • A NEW YORKER BEST
BOOK OF THE YEAR • From one of our most accomplished novelists a mesmerizing story about a
mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War—and a brilliant
portrait of family endurance against all odds "A tour de force." —Tayari Jones author of An
American Marriage 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
the adult in her family for as long as she can remember finds herself on a buckboard journey
with her mother Eliza who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They 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 world. 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 story: 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 mysterious man they call the Night Watch the orphan 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 stunning chronicle of surviving
war and its aftermath.