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  • What an interesting novel from Russia. It was really refreshing to read something from another country (although it was translated). I really like the whole light vs. dark scenario going on. It almost makes the light (or good) side seem like the real bad guys. I also like how each person actually ch ... Continue

    What an interesting novel from Russia. It was really refreshing to read something from another country (although it was translated). I really like the whole light vs. dark scenario going on. It almost makes the light (or good) side seem like the real bad guys. I also like how each person actually chooses if they are light or dark and if one is dark, it doesn't make them evil. I almost have to wonder if Lukyanenko ever read Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising. After reading Rising, I found some similar themes. I know they are all taken from mythology, but I found them to be very close, which fascinated me. The book is long and is actually three stories in one. However, it went really fast and I couldn't wait to continue on the story. I highly recommend this book to sci-fi fans.

    

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• ― cjspock said on Oct 2, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

The phenomenal Russian bestseller. A vampire novel set in a richly realized post-Soviet Moscow, The Night Watch has sold across Europe and to 20th Century Fox for huge advances.

In The Night Watch, the first of a trilogy, and reminiscent of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials in its ambitions and achievement, the setting is contemporary Moscow. A small number of Muscovites with supernatural powers — those who are Other, owing allegiance either to the Dark or the Light — co-exist in an uneasy truce, each side keeping a close eye on the other’s activities around the city.

Anton, an Other on the side of the Light, is a night-watchman, patrolling the streets and Metro of the city as he protects ordinary people from the vampires of the Dark. On his rounds, Anton comes across a young woman, Svetlana, whom he realizes is under a curse that threatens the entire city, and a boy, Igor, a young Other, as yet unaware of his own enormous power. Partnered by Olga, an Other who is in the form of an owl, he struggles to remove the curse and thereby save the city, while at the same time prevent Igor from falling into the clutches of the Dark.

The Night Watch explores the nature of good and evil and the tensions between the individual and the collective in a gripping narrative that owes as much to The Master and Margarita as it is does to the richly realized worlds of Philip Pullman and Tolkien.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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