Night Watch

Jayne Anne Phillips's Night Watch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2024, with the Pulitzer board citing its "lyrical precision" in capturing a world that official history largely left blank. It is also Phillips's first novel in eleven years, and it arrives with the care and deliberateness that kind of interval suggests. Set in 1874 in the mountains of West Virginia, it follows a mother and daughter who arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum not as patients in the ordinary sense but as fugitives, seeking the only shelter available to women with nowhere else to go.

Phillips, author of Machine Dreams and Lark and Termite, writes with meticulous attention to period voice and social texture. The asylum becomes a kind of compressed society, populated with figures (the mysterious Night Watch, the orphan Weed, the formidable kitchen supervisor) who carry the weight of a broader American story. The prose is dense and rewarding, the kind of fiction that repays slow reading and asks students to think carefully about whose stories get told and whose get silenced.

At 304 pages, the novel is well suited to courses in American literature, Civil War fiction, or the history of medicine and institutions. Published by Knopf.