Night Watch

(Paperback)

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Moving back and forth between 1874 and 1864, NIght Watch is set in the divided state of Virginia during the American Civil War. A young girl, ConaLee, lives with her mother in a house on a deserted ridge, hiding from the armies of both South and North while her father is away, fighting for the Union. When a marauding, maddened soldier finds their home among the trees, there is nothing ConaLee can do to stop him taking whatever he wants. Further up the ridge lives Dearbhla, whom ConaLee has known since she was born - an old woman who is endlessly resourceful, intuitive, tough and clever. But even she cannot help ConaLee now.

The Civil War is brutal, chaotic and apparently endless, but this is a novel about love - familial, romantic, social - and what happens when that love is distorted and trashed. It's about sanity and madness, slavery and freedom, identity and psychic disintegration, set against a natural world that is both man's enemy and salvation. At the same time, it has a heart-in-mouth plot driven by passion and jeopardy, and in the midst of the madness stands the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, a project born of reason, kindness and hope, which may or may not offer redemption.

Author Bio

Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia. She is the author of four novels, Lark and Termite (2008), MotherKind (2000), Shelter (1994) and Machine Dreams (1984), and two collections of widely anthologized stories, Fast Lanes (1987) and Black Tickets (1979). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Bunting Fellowship. She has been awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction (1980) and an Academy Award in Literature (1997) by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, and has appeared in Granta, Harper's, DoubleTake, and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. She is currently Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey.