The Watch: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• “[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…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 re-animates the timeless themes of Antigone…This brave, visceral novel breaks new ground and does what previous versions of Antigone never have: It makes each character deeply humane, challenging the reader to sympathize with every one of them.”

  — NPR.org

• “An engaging work of timeless imagination, both vivid and gritty.”

  — Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star

• “The fog of war doesn’t begin to describe what awaits the American soldiers in Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s novel The Watch…Roy-Bhattacharya consulted with front-line officers to get his details right. His description of the firefight in a sandstorm is gripping and terrifying; so are his overlapping accounts of the ethical and military decisions that young men, fatigued, distraught, and unsupported, have to make.”

  — Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

• “The power of Roy-Bhattacharya’s novel is his understanding of all the motivations driving his players. None of their reasons is unreasonable…except as perceived by the other side…Roy-Bhattacharya’s brutally honest portrayal of a remote Afghan confrontation explores the complexities of America’s longest war.”

  — Shelf Awareness

• “Must read fiction. [A] subtle, discomfiting novel, a nonsequential tale that defies conventional storytelling. It contains first-person descriptions from characters who end up dead—traditionally a no-no in fiction, as it tricks the reader into believing such characters have “lived to tell the tale.” And yet in a novel inspired by the tale of Antigone (who made her name by flouting the so-called rule of law), defying convention seems perfectly apt…The threat of the unexpected is one of this novel’s most charming enticements, along with its beautiful renderings of the harsh Afghan landscape, where ‘mountains look like serrated shadows rising into the air’…Given the author’s deft arrangement of scenes, readers will dutifully persevere to see what happens, even if the ending is foretold, tragic, and seemingly inevitable.”

  — Daily Beast

• “Indian novelist Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya adapts the Greek tragedy of Antigone to present-day Afghanistan, telling a harrowing story of a woman who demands the return of her brother’s body and refuses to leave a US military base in Kandahar.”

  — Christian Science Monitor (Best Book of Summer 2012)

• “[A] poignant tale of the war in Afghanistan. Inevitable repercussions for the soldiers and citizens of the country play out viscerally in a plot that takes its cues from the Antigone myth.”

  — Columbus Dispatch

• “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.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• “Difficult to put down, powerful, eloquent, and even haunting.”

  — Booklist (starred review)

• “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, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of NBCC finalist War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

• “Masterful novel…The book is particularly strong on men in combat, their bloodlust, and their emotional frailty. A powerful reading experience.”

  — Sydney Morning Herald