BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Night Watch)(Book review)

The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters (Riverhead; $25.95). In the fall of 1947, an androgynous woman walks aimlessly through the scarred streets of London, adjusting her cufflinks. An ambulance driver during the Blitz, she now does nothing more dramatic than go to the cinema, arriving midway through a film and watching the second half first--"People's pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures." Likewise, this historical novel begins at the end and moves backward, tracing the lives of its characters from peacetime Britain to the early years of the war. The centerpiece of the book is set in 1944, when the characters come fully alive, creeping through blackout London--an apocalyptic landscape of rubble and ash, searchlights and fires. Waters, acclaimed for her Victorian-era romps, has done meticulous research, and renders wartime scenes with unnerving authenticity.

Duchess of Nothing, by Heather McGowan (Bloomsbury; $23.95). An unnamed woman of indeterminate age is abandoned by her lover in Rome, and left to care for his seven-year-old brother. This premise, suggestive of some modern-day Henry James novel, is full of potential, but McGowan's minimalist execution is disappointing. She presents the reader with only the faintest gradations of plot, setting, and character development, the better to focus attention on the narrator's voice. These musings, aiming for offbeat charm, seem mannered ("It was intolerable of my parents not to have organized a sibling") and mundane ("My feet please me enormously today"). And the blankness of the narrator (she used to work in a bank, had a cat, and "read fat novels while I drank hot liquids") reduces the interest of her emerging relationship with her young charge, which is by turns narcissistic, sadistic, and loving.

Earthly Powers, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins; $29.95). Burleigh, a historian of the Third ...