At last! Powells featured author interviewee this week is one of my favorite authors, Sarah Waters. She has written three novels, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith, set in Victorian England, exploring the lives of women scraping out a living, often on the wrong side of the law and certainly on the wrong side of polite society.
Her new novel, The Night Watch, moves into the World War II era.
And, of course, it is. The Night Watch is not only artfully constructed (a Waters trademark) and beautifully written, it also manages to offer a fresh perspective on an era whose stockpile of stories had seemed all but used up. Set in London during and after the Battle of Britain, The Night Watch traces — in reverse — the stories of a handful of ordinary Londoners. But like all great novelists, as Waters delves into her characters lives, gradually revealing their longings, their fears, the peculiar paradoxes of their fates, they emerge as human beings, at once singular and universal — and quite extraordinary.
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