Night Watch: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024 – Phillips Jayne Anne (2025)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2024, Night Watch is set in 1874, in the aftermath of the War, when erasure, trauma and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee and her mother Eliza, who has not spoken for more than a year, arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, brought to its entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their lives. Far from their family, a beloved neighbour and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives. As their story unfolds, the realities of war and race emerge: their flight to the highest ridges of western Virginia and the disappearance of ConaLee’s father, who left for the war and never returned. In the asylum, ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid while Eliza slowly responds to treatment. They become caught up in the life of the institution, including the mystery surrounding the man known as the Night Watch, the child called Weed, the formidable woman who runs the kitchen and the remarkable doctor at its head. Epic, enthralling and meticulously crafted, Night Watch is a powerful portrait of family endurance and a chronicle of surviving war and its aftermath.