Night Watch

Shortlisted for the 2021 Danuta Gleed Literary Award

Three poetic novellas centred around the author’s background of growing up as the child of a veterinarian.

Full of humour and compassion, Night Watch collects three novellas that explore the lives of rural veterinarians. Wigmore’s vets struggle to stay awake during unending calving seasons, reaching for moments of stillness and grace between phone calls and farm calls; they balance their own family’s births and deaths with shepherding animals through caesareans and euthanasia, covering miles of road in their vast jurisdictions during harsh winters and muddy, ruthless springs. Travelling from small towns in northern BC to the south of France and Fiji, sometimes in the span of a night and sometimes over a lifetime, the men and women in Night Watch work with their hands, keep their hearts in check, and strain to define themselves against the backdrop of an unforgiving job that puts them at the mercy of the elements—and each other.

“One might assume the graphic viscera of farm medicine wouldn’t lend itself to beautiful writing, but one would be wrong—Wigmore’s lilting writing is as soothing as a lullaby.”—Chatelaine

“Wigmore’s prose brings to mind Alice Munro’s ability to capture the complex emotions that simmer underneath quiet, quotidian moments.”—Vancouver Sun