Night Watch

From one of our most accomplished novelists, a mesmerizing story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War.

In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. 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’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their lives. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.

The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their backstory: their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the war and never returned. Meanwhile in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility—the mystery behind the man they call the Night Watch; the child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.

Epic, enthralling, and meticulously crafted, Night Watch is a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds, and a stunning chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath.

Praise & Reviews

“Beautiful, mournful . . . Carefully and engrossingly crafted . . . The good suffer equally with the bad. Phillips’s artistic conscience won’t let her flinch from this truth, but her generous heart won’t let it be the last word. She leaves readers with a rueful yet doggedly hopeful maxim that could easily serve as an epigraph for Night Watch as a whole: ‘Endurance was strength.’”
—Wendy Smith, The Washington Post

“A story of trauma and restoration in the aftermath of the Civil War . . . Ms. Phillips presents harrowing, visceral scenes of war, but a lot of this novel relates the daily business of convalescence in an asylum, with loving attention given to the motley staff that tends to the unwell . . . The theme of healing extends to the plot. Ms. Phillips, who is drawn to depicting the poor, the mentally disabled, the wounded and other vulnerable souls, is a principled practitioner of narrative magic. Not only serendipity but a kind of clairvoyance connects the characters . . . Goodness is a real thing in this novel—a verifiable force—and the question posed is whether we still have the sensitivity to discern it.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Phillips is very good at is capturing a sort of inner dialect, conveyed here in a language inflected with a Southern twang, modulated to reflect characters’ social status and degree of education . . . It is when Phillips channels [these] thoughts that the telling, like the story itself, becomes [so] compelling, even beautiful.”
—Ellen Akins, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“There is a luminous beauty in Phillips’s prose. Whether it is the dark interiors of war–which have become her forte–or the equally complex and fraught lives of so-called “ordinary” people, Phillips brings these theaters of peace and loss, death and transcendence together with a remarkable alchemy.”
—Ken Burns

“Jayne Anne Phillips is a wonderfully gifted storyteller, and few contemporary writers can match the lyricism of her prose, but in this marvelous new novel, largely set in a factual nineteenth-century asylum, she achieves even more: history and imagination merge, and she gives the past a living pulse.”
—Ron Rash, author of The Caretaker

“Jayne Anne Phillips is a brilliant artist working at the height of her powers. Word by word, and line by line, there is no one better. This novel lives where a startling imagination meets scrupulous research: Night Watch is a tour de force—breathtaking in both its scope and intensity.” —Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

“A lovely piece of work . . . Night Watch is another of Jayne Anne Phillips’s intimate revelatory creations.”
—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

“It’s hard to know what to praise first – Jayne Anne Phillips’s signature beautiful sentences, the compelling scenes of battle and their ravaged aftermath, the fascinating portrayal of Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride’s “moral treatment” method for the mentally ill, or the vivid depiction of the people and land of West Virginia in the 1860s and 70s. Night Watch takes a highly deserved place among important novels about war and its legacy.”
—Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point

“A profound meditation on identity, empathy, sanity, daughter-love, nature, and the Civil War, Night Watch will leave you shook and sustained. This novel delivers fictional reckoning that makes way for the potential of real-world reconciliation by delivering complex and necessary testimony and confession. Weaving photographs and fragments of non-fiction prose into an intimate family story, Night Watch is at once shatteringly particular and audaciously universal. Jayne Anne Phillips arrives at the crowning achievement of an extraordinary career.”
—Alice Randall, author of Black Bottom Saints

“A searing portrait of the cruelties of race, the insanity of war, and the tragedy of its aftermath.”
—Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

“Haunting storytelling and a refreshing look at history . . . Set in West Virginia during and after the Civil War, Phillips’s book takes as given that slavery was evil and the war a necessity, focusing instead on lives torn apart by the conflict and on the period’s surprisingly enlightened approach toward care for the mentally ill. . . . The novel’s pitch-perfect voice belongs to ConaLee, observant and loving but also a scrappy survivor. [Her] lineage, revealed piecemeal, exemplifies a complex world . . . Here the asylum becomes the catalyst for characters to uncover identities lost, hidden, or unknown. . . .Expect coincidences and convolutions, but Phillips’ pulls them off with gorgeous prose, attention to detail, and masterful characters.
—Kirkus, ★ starred review