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Title: The Watch

Author: Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya

Narrator: Kris Koscheski, Richard Allen, Kaleo Griffith, Zadran Wali, Dustin Rubin, George Newbern, Reha Zamani

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-04-14

Publisher: Random House Audiobooks

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Youve had no sleep since the firefight last night.The morning fog beyond the walls of your base lifts to reveal a lone woman approaching the gate.

She says she has come to claim the body of her brother killed in last nights attack.

Is she a terrorist? A spy? A lunatic? Or what she says she is a grieving sister? What should you do? What do you do?

Shortlisted for the Criticos Prize and the Boeke Prize and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the DSC Asian Literature Prize. One of Publishers Weekly's ten best contemporary war novels.

Critic Reviews:

"The first great novel of the war in Afghanistan." (Wall Street Journal)

Members Reviews:

Antigone meets Afghanistan

The Watch - a kind of modern re-working of Sophocles' Antigone set in Afghanistan - is a richly drawn, quick reading novel. At first I was unsure whether the book was going to be too little nuanced, turning into a nakedly anti-war novel with not much substance. I was relieved to be proven wrong. Not that I am "pro-war" - just that I didn't want to read a novel that was overtly grinding a black or white political axe. Like Sophocles' tragedy, The Watch plays on the dichotomy between nomos (human convention) and phusis (natural law) - that which man conjures to fit his various and changing needs vs. the unwritten trans-personal laws one is "bound" to follow or obey. What I liked about the book is that it presents both sides - the Afghanis and Americans as being oppressed (in a different but quite mutually destructive way) by the same arbitrary laws of mankind - all the while searching, quite poignantly at times, for a way to go beyond them and simply do "what's right". This doing of "what's right" is initially set up, for the sake of poignancy, to fall on the shoulders of a young Afghan girl wishing to bury her dead brother - dead at the hands of Americans defending themselves against an insurgent attack. There is "right" and "wrong" on both sides - reasons for the Americans to be highly suspicious but insensitive and reason to see the girl as principled but displaying a naive devotion. The book revolves around this tension - this confrontation of wills. What the book was so successful at, in my opinion, was its articulation of how war (especially between such too different cultures) makes getting "what's right" so incredibly hard - how the road to hell is truly paved with good intentions. For, when two people(s) don't understand each other how is it possible for one to really help the other? Helping people and achieving a geo-politcal end under the guise of helping people are not the same thing; this is what the book addresses - whether we can break free of the powers that be in this world (our Creon's - to evoke Antigone) so as to allow us enough room to reach out, to extend ourselves far enough, that we may approach something meaningful being done.

ENG372 Transnational Literature Book Review

This book in one I truly couldn't put down. I found myself reading almost the entirety of it in only a few hours and recommending it to everybody I've talked to. As a person who wouldn't typically pick this genre as a typical one to read, I am happy with my purchase as well as the magic of Bhattacharya's writing.