The Night Watch
Amazon.com link
My review -
Duncan
is in a dead-end job, having been in prison. His sister is seeing a married
man. Kay lives a solitary aimless life. Julie and Helen’s relationship is rocky
due to Helen’s jealousy. Little bits of their 1947 lives are dropped as hints
that something in their past is relevant to their situations now. And then we
go back, and a little further back, to see what happened.
This
story looks at an existing situation and shows us how the characters got to
where they now are. The war is an ever-present horror in the later sections and
a haunting wraith in the first. Sarah Waters’ writing is always beautiful and
the characters’ dialogue is spot on, bringing them to life. I really love this
idea of going back in a story, rather than forward. We are often given hints of
a back-story but here we live through those events as they happen – just in
reverse order. This fills in a lot of things we didn’t know, but explains the
situation in the earlier, 1947 section. It’s an unusual device but it worked
very well for me.
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