The Night Watch

Four Londoners move through lives reshaped by wartime and its aftermath. Their friendships, loves and private histories intersect across a city of air raids, damaged streets and places where desire can briefly escape public expectations. Rather than moving forward toward consequences, the novel travels backward through the 1940s, revealing how the characters arrived at circumstances that initially seem fixed. Earlier encounters alter the meaning of later estrangements, loyalties and silences. The women’s relationships with one another occupy a central place within this connected story, alongside a young man carrying a difficult past. As the chronology retreats toward 1941, intimate choices become inseparable from the upheaval of the city around them.