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The Night Watch

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About this listen

Shortlisted for the British Book Awards, Book of the Year, 2007.
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.

©2006 Sarah Waters; (P)2006 Time Warner AudioBooks Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Romance War Tear-jerking

The Pride List of Queer Storytelling

To mark Pride 2023 Audible teamed up with non-profit organisation, Out on the Page, supporter and champion of LGBTQIA+ writers and writing, to release an extensive Pride List of Queer Storytelling. Featuring contributions from some of the UK’s most important and exciting voices from the LGBTQIA+ community, this audiobook is one of the many featured on the list that is available to listen to on Audible.
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Critic reviews

"A truthful, lovely book that needs no conjuring tricks to make you want to read it again." (Observer)

"Brilliantly done....A tour-de-force of hints, clues, and dropped threads." (Independent on Sunday)
All stars
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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.

Lesbian love in the Second World War

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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.

Good characters and atmosphere

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A real "so what" "and the point is" experience.

It's a character led story but I didn't find the characters interesting or convincing. In particular I found the portrayal of the class cartoonist and annoying.

Having failed to be grabbed by the characters the lack of interesting or exciting narrative made this a dull experience for me. The backwards telling of a thin story only made it worse.

Normally I would not have finished the book but it came highly recommended and I was keen to discover why.

Maybe this is a book better read than listened to.

Disappointed

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It took me a few starts to get into this book. For some reason I found the characters hard to connect with and the depression of the post-war setting put me off. Once I got past that, though, I actually found the minutiae of detail about people's every-day lives during that time in our history quite fascinating.


I had read Fingersmith, but somehow didn't connect either that book or the author with the lesbian/gay genre. The Nightwatch is more clearly of that genre. There is a scene, in a park, where one of the characters is uncomfortable about holding hands with her lover in public. It made me wonder about how little our attitudes have changed in many ways - there are still people I know who would not dare to be open about their relationships. So the book is quite thought-provoking in that respect - makes you think of things from a different perspective. I really enjoy books that can enlarge my understanding of a subject or a time-period but still retain the narrative, and The Night Watch certainly does that.


The structure of the book is that it starts in the post-war years, introducing the characters, and then progresses backward to reveal the history of each plot-line. It's an interesting approach, but I found it quite disatisfying in the end. I wanted more closure, especially for those characters that I'd grown attached to.

Interesting, enjoyable, strangely dissatsifying

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I really felt each characters emotions, especially Kay. I love the 1940s and this book takes you back in time. Will definitely read another of Sarah books.

First book of Sarah Waters

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