After much anticipation, award-winning author Sarah Waters' (Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith) latest novel, The Night Watch, finally debuts today in the United States today--and it doesn't disappoint.

The book has received widely glowing reviews from British critics, and was recently long-listed for the Orange Prize, a prestigious award granted to women writers (Fingersmith was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002).

Unlike Waters' previous Victorian historical novels, The Night Watch is set in 1940s London, and moves much more slowly and deliberately. It isn't until the second part of the novel
that the plot really picks up, but even then it is still an intimate, close story—an examination of the private lives
and unexpected connections that leap up between people
brought together during World War II.

The most unique twist in The Night Watch is the fact that it moves backward in time. Beginning in 1947, the novel then shifts back to 1944, and finally to 1941. Though it may at first seem a rather unusual way to tell a story, it fits very well with the characters that Waters has created. When we first meet them, we see how they are adapting to the postwar period, and we are curious about how they came to be in their particular situations. Moving backward in time also makes what might have been a mostly depressing read conclude in a place of hope.

The novel revolves around the lives of four main characters: Kay, a butch lesbian who was an ambulance driver during the Second World War; Helen, who in 1947 works at a matchmaking service and is living with her lover, Julia; Vivian, Helen's coworker who is having an affair with a married man; and Duncan, Vivian's younger brother, who was imprisoned during the war for a crime that is only revealed at the conclusion of the novel.

As the story unfolds, we come to see, in surprising but fitting revelations, how each person is connected to another, by the random bombings during the war or through relationships with each other that are not, at first, what they seem.

The effect is that of a more intimate version of Alice Pieszecki's chart on The L Word, a reminder that all of our lives are connected, even if those connections are not immediately apparent. It turns out that Kay is mourning the loss of her relationship with Helen, who in 1947 is dealing with the gradual dissolution of her relationship with another woman, Julia.

Their relationship began during the 1944 portion of the novel, and the blooming of their illicit affair during a London blackout, with bombs thudding over the city, is both beautifully written and terribly sad, given the fact that we know what happens to them later. Julia is also connected to Kay, but the truth of their connection is not revealed until nearly the end of the novel.

The shortest part of The Night Watch is the portion set in 1941, when we at last discover why Duncan was imprisoned during the war. But though the reason behind Duncan's imprisonment is set up to be one of the more dramatic revelations of the novel, I found the connections between Julia and Kay and Helen to be much more meaningful.

Indeed, Duncan's storyline is in many ways the weakest of the novel. His experiences in prison during the war are fascinating, reflecting Waters' continuing engagement with issues of confinement that have cropped up in her earlier novels (the madhouse in Fingersmith, the prison in Affinity), but the cause of his imprisonment seems, in the end, somewhat far-fetched.

Nonetheless, The Night Watch is an absorbing, multilayered read, marked with Waters' talent for delivering a palpable sense of place and time. Those who expect an edge-of-your-seat romp through the lusty lives of lesbians in London might be disappointed, but despite the change in time and mood, Waters still sounds like herself. Her lesbian characters are fully fleshed, real women, and their desires and needs resonate, particularly given the slightly restrained style of The Night Watch, which artfully evokes 1940s London, from the joy of obtaining a pair of silk pajamas to the frightening aftermath of an air raid.

In the beginning of the novel, Kay tells her friend Mickey, who used to drive ambulances with her during the war, that she spends much of her time going to the cinema. “Sometimes I go in half-way through, and watch the second half first. I almost prefer them that way—people's pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures.”

The characters of The Night Watch are interesting precisely because we come to know them in reverse, the same way that we come to know our own friends and lovers. We meet them at a certain point in time, and as our relationships with them develop, chunks of their past are revealed that show us how they became the people they are.

There may be fewer plot twists and tricks in The Night Watch than in Fingersmith, but those who take the time to know Waters' wartime London and its inhabitants will come away with a much richer sense of the connections that create the many layers of our identities.

Waters is on tour in the U.S. through April. Get more information at SarahWaters.com and buy the book from Amazon.com