- Published: 1 May 2012
- ISBN: 9781742752754
- Imprint: Vintage Australia
- Format: Trade Paperback
- Pages: 336
- RRP: $32.99
The Watch
- Published: 1 May 2012
- ISBN: 9781742752754
- Imprint: Vintage Australia
- Format: Trade Paperback
- Pages: 336
- RRP: $32.99
This is a rich, unsettling, politically astute novel that will haunt you for a long time after you finish reading it.
Kerryn Goldsworthy, The Sydney Morning Herald
A powerful reading experience.
Lucy Sussex, The Age
[The novel] achieves a subtle balance of dramatic forces—personal morality and public order, duty to God and duty to country—that gives it a philosophical depth and wrenching humanity…Mr. Roy-Bhattacharya brings a rigorous and often disquieting sense of empathy to each of his clashing characters. There is no outright villain here, only the collision of people stubbornly holding to what they believe to be right and honorable. This is the essence of tragedy, and it makes The Watch the first great novel of the war in Afghanistan.
Wall Street Journal
Roy-Bhattacharya goes from strength to strength in the closing stages of what develops into a remarkable novel, because of his use of memory filtered through the horrors of the moment. States of mind, both fractured and lucid, dominate this serious and honourable novel about war. By drawing on classical literature, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya has fashioned a beautiful and heartfelt lamentation.
Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
The Watch is a stunning account of war, of the terrifying range of emotions, the despair and the sheer fatigue which men have to endure in combat. It is a must-read for anyone interested in our common humanity and the terrible things we do to each other. The Watch is quite simply superb.
Rob Minshull, 612 ABC Brisbane
We watch as the resistance of an isolated American garrison in Afghanistan is ground down, not by force of arms but by the will of a single unarmed woman, holding inflexibly to an idea of what is just and right.
JM Coetzee
A poignant and important book about one of the defining events of the start of the 21stcentury; it is devastatingly eloquent and unequivocal about the fact that there is no glory or beauty in war.
Fatima Bhutto
The Watch is a powerful tale, courageous both in concept and creation: an ancient tale made modern, passed through different narrators in extraordinary shape shifting prose that makes this not just an important novel, but a remarkable read.
Aminatta Forna
An important book for our times, in which one woman's determination and refusal to consent sets an example of courage and honesty.
Giles Foden
Every war spawns its major literary works, and Roy-Bhattacharya's powerful, modern take on the Afghanistan armed conflict resonates with the echoes of Joseph Heller, Tim O'Brien and Robert Stone.
Starred review, Publisher's Weekly
The Watch touches on nearly every trope of war novels, but like the best of the breed, it does so in fresh, exciting ways. Difficult to put down, powerful, eloquent, and even haunting.
Starred review, Booklist
...Lyrically written but emotionally exacting... All in all, it's an extraordinary, shape-shifting telling that exacts a devastating emotional toll.
Bron Sibree, West Australian, Perth
A legless woman approaches a military outpost in Afghanistan's Kandahar Province, ostensibly to retrieve the body of her brother, who has been killed in a firefight. Having survived that firefight, the soldiers inside the compound are wary and edgy. That's the setup to a taut and gritty story that unfolds amid the dust, shadows, and unease of one slice of the war in Afghanistan. Playing with the myth of Antigone, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya has crafted an eloquent and intimate look at the types of events still occurring on a daily basis. At the Tarsandan combat outpost, as the woman refuses to leave and questions mount about her true intentions, everything comes into question--what's right and wrong? why are we here? Barbaric, heartfelt, heartbreaking, and lyrical, this is a primal and beautiful work. And a page-turner to the very last page.
Neal Thompson, Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2012
Rejecting the idea that ongoing armed conflicts are for journalists, not novelists, this Indian-American writer has set his third book in present-day Afghanistan. On one level it recasts Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, telling the story of a local woman who approaches the U.S. Army base her brother had attacked, hoping to bury his body. But it’s also a contemporary rumination on a clash of cultures and ideologies. Roy-Bhattacharya tells his story from multiple, conflicting points of view — this is fiction that forces us to react, to feel, perhaps even to change our minds.
Mike Doherty, National Post (Canada) Summer Fiction Picks
This brave, visceral novel breaks new ground. It makes each character deeply humane, challenging the reader to sympathise with every one of them.
Jaya Aninda Chatterjee, NPR
Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya's lyrical and poignant evocation of war is a potent reminder of the murderous futility of our imperial adventures in the Middle East. He captures the raw brutality of industrial warfare, along with its trauma, senselessness, random death and stupidity. His characters, including the soldiers who prosecute the war and the innocents whose lives are maimed and destroyed by it, are consumed alike in the vast orgy of death that sweeps across war zones to extinguish all that is human -- tenderness, compassion,understanding and finally love. He forces us to face the evil we do to others and to ourselves.
Chris Hedges
Awesome!
Kaye, Wright, Random House Australia
With a pulsing plot and vivid characters, The Watch is intense, moving and powerful. I loved it. It offers every perspective on the war in Afghanistan, making it such an urgent and important novel to read.
Antonia Hayes, Random House Australia