Night Watch
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024
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Beschreibung des Verlags
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024
'A haunting story of conflict with hope at its heart' Daily Mail
'A tour de force - breathtaking in both its scope and intensity' TAYARI JONES
'Shatteringly particular and audaciously universal' ALICE RANDALL
'Excellent... Phillips has brought a little more of this foundational American episode into the light' GUARDIAN
In the wake of the Civil War, twelve-year-old ConaLee and her mother Eliza, who hasn't spoken in more than a year, arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia. Delivered to the hospital by a war veteran known to ConaLee as Papa, mother and daughter are soon swept up in the life of the facility and its characters: the night watchman who lost his eye in battle, the child called Weed, the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen, and the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution. There, far from family and the mountain home they knew, ConaLee and Eliza try to reclaim their lives, and uncover identities lost, hidden or unknown.
Night Watch was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024 on 6 May 2024
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Exquisite attention to detail propels a superb meditation on broken families in post–Civil War West Virginia from Phillips (Lark and Termite). In 1874, 12-year-old ConaLee and her mute mother, Eliza, are delivered to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston by an abusive man known to ConaLee as Papa, who has sold off the pair's possessions. Papa assures ConaLee that the asylum will cure Eliza; before he departs, he also reveals he is not ConaLee's father. Mother and daughter are welcomed by night watchman O'Shea, a Union Army veteran who lost his eye in battle. As her health improves, Phillips oscillates between 1874 and 1864 to fill in narrative puzzles, explaining Eliza's quiet nature, the origins of Papa in their lives, the identity and fate of ConaLee's real father, and O'Shea's injury. A profound sense of loss haunts the novel, and Phillips conveys a strong sense of place (describing the asylum, she writes, "There was noise and commotion, all of a piece, like off-pitch music"). The bruised and turbulent postbellum era comes alive in Phillips's page-turning affair.
