Sarah Waters weaves together several stories to create a well-paced novel filled with memorable characters. ( )

Moving back through the 1940's, The Night Watch tells the stories of Londoners Kay, Viv, Duncan & Helen.

Not only is The Night Watch told in a fascinating and unique way but Sarah Waters is able to create characters that are truly intreguing and leave the reader wanting to turn just one more page in a bid to unravel a little bit more information about their lives. ( )

In The Night Watch, Sarah Waters signals an ambitious leap forward via her use of reverse chronology and the relatively complex intermingling of her characters lives. Her efforts were rewarded handsomely, earning places on the Man Booker and Orange Prize shortlists. Having just devoured the book in a couple of late-night sittings, I'd have to agree the recognition was well deserved.

Waters' cleverly interwoven threads mesh together to create the stories of five young Londoners during World War Two. I found myself most intrigued by the Kay-Helen-Julia story; the sections about the young prisoner Duncan were somewhat dull by comparison. Yet I can easily imagine that for some readers the reverse would be true. Overall, The Night Watch was an engaging, thoughtful and subtly sexy book - what in years to come will be known as "vintage Waters". ( )

Ik vond dit een prachtig boek. Mooi geschreven (goed vertaald) en erg goed dat het verteld werd van 1947 naar 1941. Dat bracht een speciale spanning met zich mee. ( )

Sarah Waters has created a very moving, and erotic, tale of how several lives are interwoven. The setting is in London during World War II and traces backwards how a small group of people came to be associated with each other. My previous exposure to Ms Waters’ was through film adaptations of two of her other novels, Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet, so I was not surprised that she continues her theme of love between women, but I was delighted to find her prose very delicate and fluid.

One unsettling aspect of the book is the author does not treat time in a strictly linear fashion, she bounces around from post WWII, to the middle of WWII and then to the beginnings of WWII. Within each era, time does flows in a forward direction, but the jumps backward are abrupt. Once the narrative begins again, however, the reader is quickly oriented to where you are and becomes immersed in the detail. This trick of chronology helps heighten the action of the characters and works very effectively on the reader.

I mentioned this is an erotic story, but the eroticism is secondary to the real love, and betrayal, between the main characters. We also learn that not all love translates to a physical act, either. There is a friendship between two of the characters, Duncan and Alec, which is revealed as love, yet it is not the physical love we are expecting to have occurred between them, yet it is not totally platonic either. To say more would spoil one of the twists in this plot.

With the extreme character development Sarah Waters has imparted to her protagonists, this novel is elevated above a novel of erotic love. The sex, while relevant to the story, it is secondary to the underlying relationships of the characters. If you are looking for a read full of cheap thrills, this is not your novel. If you are offended by same sex love scenes, this is not for you either. If you are still with me, try this for something seriously different. It is a deep story of a very trying time and shows how the many aspects of friendship will get someone through those trying times. Well worth the reading. ( )