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

Publication: The New Yorker

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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...

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