Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked out streets, illicit liaisons, sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch is the work of a truly brilliant and compelling storyteller.

This is the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past, drawn with absolute truth and intimacy. Kay, who drove an ambulance during the war and lived life at full throttle, now dresses in mannish clothes and wanders the streets with a restless hunger, searching...

Helen, clever, sweet,much-loved, harbours a painful secret...Viv, glamour girl, is stubbornly, even foolishly loyal, to her soldier lover...Duncan, an apparent innocent, has had his own demons to fight during the war.

Their lives, and their secrets connect in sometimes startling ways. War leads to strange alliances...Tender, tragic and beautifully poignant, set against the backdrop of feats of heroism both epic and ordinary, here is a novel of relationships that offers up subtle surprises and twists. The Night Watch is thrilling. It is a towering achievement.

The Book of the Year 2006.

440 pages

'The characters are given equal weight and time, so that by the end of the first section you're equally gripped by all of them. It is in the second section that Waters really proves her genius with plot. We never return to the future, the drama of The Night Watch runs backwards into the war, then before. It is a measure of Waters' talent that this isn't frustrating and that the reader is quite happy to allow her to resolve all the tensions in character and plot in the past' Sunday Telegraph

'On reaching the end of the novel, it is impossible not to start anxiously again at the beginning. But this neither helps nor comforts. The Night Watch stays bleakly in the mind long after its rereading, underlining the growing authority of its author' Daily Telegraph

Sarah Waters 3 for 2