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The Day Watch
The Day Watch
Jul 27, 2025 10:40 AM

Author:Sergei Lukyanenko,Vladimir Vasiliev

The Day Watch

Walking the streets of Moscow, indistinguishable from the rest of its population, are The Others. Possessors of supernatural powers and capable of entering the Twilight, a shadowy world that exists in parallel to our own, each owes allegiance either to The Dark or The Light.

In The Day Watch, second book of the Night Watch trilogy, Alice, a young but powerful Dark Other, attends a planning meeting with her comrades in the Day Watch. The team is on a mission to apprehend an uninitiated Other, a practicing Dark witch who has so far eluded the bureaux responsible for finding and initiating unlicensed practitioners of magic. It seems a routine operation. But when they arrive, the Night Watch team has already made the arrest. A fierce battle ensues, during which Alice almost dies. Drained of her powers, she is sent to recuperate at a youth camp near the Black Sea. There she meets Igor; the chemistry between them is instant and irresistible.

But then comes a shattering realisation: Igor is a Light Mage. Suddenly Alice remembers him as one of those involved in the battle that left her crippled. Now that they know, there is no alternative to a magical duel, a battle that neither of them wants to win...

Reviews

Praise for The Night Watch:
This modern day mythical fantasy is Anne Rice on an epic scale, a hugely imagined world. A chiller thriller from cold of Russia, this one's been selling like hot cakes around the world.

—— Sunday Sport

So good that the film feels like a trailer for it

—— Time Out

JK Rowling, Russian style... Arguably Russia's richest and most famous literary talent of the moment. [a] cracking read, owing more to Rowling or Philip Pullman than it does to the horror genre... Surprisingly readable and addictive... It relies on suspense and psychological drama and a good dose of humour - rather than blood and guts.

—— Daily Telegraph

When a particular kind of story, heavily based in one culture, gets transferred into a culture distinctly different, something magical happens. Something modern, new and distinctly creepy... The magic is rooted in the realities of modern Russia. Inventive, sardonic, and imbued with a surprising the sense that, for this author and his audience, much of this stuff is new-minted.

—— Independent

The book rises magnificently to its own occasions, building out of its fact-crammed but stately sentences a vast and phosphorescent tableaux vivants seething with Dantesque detail

—— Guardian

Nor is The Kindly Ones only a great work of history and reflection, but full of striking literary writing: consummate adagios of landscape painting; lovely images and observations...even touches of macabre humour...inescapably impressive

—— Carole Angier , Literary Review

Its account of Nazi cruelty, chaos and callousness has never been surpassed in fiction... Unforgettable...magnificent

—— London Review of Books

The force and cool detachment with which author Jonathan Littell describes the physical realities of war and mass murder are searing. He has spent years on his research and clings closely to the historical record but this fictional presentation brings the accounts horrifically alive

—— Mary Brodbin , Socialist Review

[It] provides us with a remarkable, and multidimensional guide to human evil... the work itself is, above all, a tremendous argument for fiction

—— Michael Gove , The Times

It's a compelling and provocative novel

—— Charlotte Stretch , Time Out

The Kindly Ones has been hailed as the return of the great European realistic novel.

—— Sunday Herald

I dedicated most of the summer to Jonathan Littell's much-praised, internationally bestselling blockbuster and loved almost every minute of it...a magnificent achievement

—— James Delingpole , Spectator

An immense novel...The depth of detail is astounding and authentic

—— Doug Kemp , Historical Novels Review

A masterpiece

—— Antony Beevor , Seven Magazine, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year

An extremely disturbing novel

—— Toby Clements , Daily Telegraph

A remarkable and controversial novel

—— Jason Burke , Observer

Jonathan Littell veers between brilliance and bathos...

—— Sally Cousins , The Telegraph

Grotesque, dismaying, chilling in its focus on the fine detail of barbarism, this epic of evil is also addictively readable

—— Boyd Tonkin , Independent on Sunday

Compelling... utterly engaging... for anyone whose interest in his subjects is great to enough to bear their unflinching portrayal The Kindly Ones is an essential novel

—— Chris Power , The Times

It's an amazing picture of evil, wonderfully written (and very well translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell), and left me feeling as though I had supped with the damned

—— Jane Knight , The Times
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