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The Night Watch
- Narrated by: Juanita McMahon
- Length: 19 hrs and 25 mins
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Summary
Shortlisted for Audible's Listen of the Year, 2006.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2006.
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, 2006.
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller. This is the story of four Londoners, three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy.
Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching; Helen, clever, sweet, much-loved, harbours a painful secret; Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover; Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war. Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances.
Tender, tragic, and beautifully poignant, set against the backdrop of feats of heroism both epic and ordinary, here is a novel of relationships that offers up subtle surprises and twists. The Night Watch is thrilling. A towering achievement.
The Pride List of Queer Storytelling
Critic reviews
"Brilliantly done....A tour-de-force of hints, clues, and dropped threads." ( Independent on Sunday)
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What listeners say about The Night Watch
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Karen
- 26-03-06
Atmospheric and gripping
This is really good listening and I would thoroughly recommend you download it without delay. The backdrop to the characters is the war and life on the home front. As a reader you are uncertain what will happen, and this parallels the uncertainty that the characters have about their future. What if we die tomorrow? What if we don't? It is amazing to think about how people managed any kind of normal existence with bombs and buildings falling all around them. Yet here we see that for some the war also provided more freedom, and an escape from convention. People falling in love, falling out of love, people questioning the boundaries of relationships, people discovering who they are. A gripping story unravels ....
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80 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Louisa
- 23-08-06
A wonderful listen
A wonderful listen: The Night Watch
This is a wonderful listen - atmospheric and beautifully read. The most remarkable aspect of the book is the incredibly detailed description Sarah Walters gives of London during the bombing, and how sympathetically she describes the suffering and anguish of the characters. Throughout, I kept wondering whom she had talked to and how she had found out so much about what it felt like to live through that time. Most interesting of all is the way in which she subtly makes the reader reflect on how important the 1940s were for the way that people's lives changed because of the war. Although she never makes any overt statement, you feel that the characters, many of whom do not conform to social norms, were able to live freer lives than before the war and that attitudes towards them, after the war, would gradually change. Waters is excellent on people's little embarrassments. She describes how women did not like being seen going to the lavatory and how, when at work, they were not allowed to go to the lavatory except at specified times. These details, and the details about makeup and the petty tyrannies of the typing pool are what make one feel she must have talked to people and not just read about what it was like to live at that time. There are so many questions one would like to ask the author, that the interview with her at the end is a real disappointment, focusing on her schooling and sexuality rather than immense learning and her wonderful evocation of people and a period of which she can have had absolutely no personal experience.
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51 people found this helpful
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Overall
- David
- 02-12-06
Pretty dull
Well I've now finished this book, I thought it would be more about life in wartime - it isn't. The war is very much a back-drop, indeed 60% of the book is set after the war's end (yet this is the book's beginning). The charactors are not hero's; nor ordinary, basically they are lesbians and gays; or sem a bit dim, or conscientious objector's - which is fine; but they are actually not very interesting. Generally a pretty dull book - well written I suppose - but with a very misleading 'summary' which tempted me to read/listen to it.
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22 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Emma
- 28-09-06
Simply unforgettable
This is my first foray into Waters territory, and what a wonderful experience it was. At first I found the atmosphere a little gloomy and overcast, the characters rather macabre, but I was soon won over by the sheer brilliance of the writing. Waters ought to be used a paragon in all creative writing classes. The woman does not put a foot wrong. Her language, while never flamboyant, is so perfectly poised that reading her words is like watching a film, so exactly do they conjure up what she is describing.
The characters were so vivid, so unforgettable, so wonderfully human, that I felt quite bereaved when I came to the end. But even more compelling was Water's evocation of wartime Britain, and London during the air raids. It was truly like being there yourself.
In short, quite, quite wonderful. Merits every superlative you can think of.
And a word for the narrator. I've listened to quite a few audiobooks and this was by far the best narrated of any, by a huge margin. McMahon's ability to distinguish a huge cast of characters through voice and accent is unparallelled, and she is one of the few female narrators who can do a man's voice utterly convincingly. A virtuoso performance she should be sincerely proud of.
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19 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Diane
- 24-11-07
Slow but steady ... tends to leave you behind
This was a rare occasion I 'set aside' an audiobook to listen to another one before taking it up again when I had run out of others. It isn't a bad book, it is just slow. It is hard to engage with the characters (despite the narrator's myriad of 'voices') and although I had started to engage more after a few hours listening, I still found myself drifting in places and I would come back to the book having missed 10 minutes.
The characters were mostly low-key and self-effacing, which while it might have been true to that time period and may well have reflected social attitudes accurately, didn't gve me much incentive to switch on the next time.
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11 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Kirstine
- 19-08-11
Lesbian love in the Second World War
It took me a while to get into the book as a large number of characters are introduced in the early chapters, but gradually I began to follow the various players in the narrative and the interactions among them. The book tells the story backwards starting in the austere post war year of 1947 and works back to 1941. There's not much of a narrative thread, but one is kept listening by the rich day to day detail of the characters' lives as they struggle to cope with the fears and privations of the time and to find happiness in their personal relationships.
I thought the great strength of the book was the vivid evocation of what the war was like for people living and working in London. The book reminds me a bit of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, but slanted to more to the lives of ordinary people and with a bias to lesbian relationships. Lesbian love scenes are quite graphically described and, not being lesbian, left me unmoved, but it did make me realize how tedious heterosexual love scenes of main-stream literature must be for gay people!
Most of the book is worthy of five stars, but I down-graded my rating as I thought the beginning was too slow and confusing and might put some off continuing. I'm not entirely convinced that the retrospective chronology was an effective device.
The reader of this marathon book is outstanding and really brought the character alive for me.
There's an interesting interview with the author at the end of the recording.
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9 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Elizabeth
- 05-03-07
Engaging
Wonderfully engaging characters; I loved the way details were gradually revealed, mysteries explained and misconceptions corrected.
I was taken aback when I realised that we were going backwards in time. Once I'd adjusted to that, though, I found this to be a fascinating meditation on how the characters reached their rather dull starting points - and of course, an interesting depiction of the way WWII affected ordinary people in Britain.
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7 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Discerning
- 12-07-06
DREADFUL
SO FAR DREADFULLY BORING
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7 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Mirium
- 24-03-09
Weird and compelling
I'm really glad I heard this as an audio book rather than reading it, otherwise I might have been tempted to skip back and forwards to try to work out what the heck was going on. The reverse timeline was possibly a bit too clever, but dealing with effects before causes did give the story an unusual kind of depth.
Particularly compelling was the author's depiction of a relationship that is falling apart, and the weird little things people do when the worst happens.
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6 people found this helpful
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Overall
- David Crabbe
- 18-08-07
Good characters and atmosphere
I was somewhat wary of this book given the author's championing of lesbian and gay fiction. However, I was pleasantly surprised because the 'sexual relations' content of the story is almost indidental. There are several central characters each of whom is constructed in a fashion that makes them not only believable but worthy of the reader's emotion. Emotions run strong throughout the book and are bolstered by a very tangible environmental atmosphere built with a superb eye for detail. The reader/listner can really feel the 'grubbiness' of the time and the lack of quality of life. However, the stociscism of those living at that time really comes through givng a real flavour of what life was like both in the war years and in the immediate post war period.
The book is superbly read giving life to male and female characters alike (dare I say a rare trait with a female narrator?!). It provides for an engrossing read/listen, primarily beacuse of the richness of the characters rather than the strength of the story. I have some doubts as to whether the device of utilising a reverse timeline really works to best advantage, but that might be a matter of personal taste.
In sum, the book is certainly a recommended listen not least on account of the strong characterisation and the excellent narration.
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6 people found this helpful