Night Watch has a lot of work to do, setting up the Watches and giving us a sense of how magic works in this world, all while still telling a complex story that involves wheels within wheels within wheels, as the heads of the Moscow Watches make feints and manipulate events for their own gain. But beyond that, what you’ll get depends so much on where you are in the series.Īre you in the first book, Night Watch? Then what you have is a tightly plotted piece of espionage as chess game, with the Watches trading pieces in a complicated plot that revolves around a young woman who’s been cursed by an unknown enemy. Every novel takes the same structure – three short novellas, all intertwined to varying degrees as pieces in me larger story – and all focus on a protagonist named Anton Godoretsky, a Light Other who narrates all the books except the second, and still features heavily in that one’s story. That gives you a sense of the backdrop of the Watch series, yes, but even then, it’s hard to capture what reading these books is really like. In other words, what you’re getting is part fantasy novel, part espionage thriller, part supernatural and horror thriller – oh, and it’s all written from a Russian perspective, and filled with the bleak humor and hardened perspective that comes with that territory, to say nothing of a very different view of the world, pop culture, and politics. But they are constantly pushing against each other, struggling for more power in destructive ways…and so the Treaty was signed, and the Watches maintain it, ensuring that no side takes an advantage without the other getting an equal advantage There are Others all around humanity, you see – Magicians, yes, but also vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, and more. But here’s a start: a deeply Russian dark urban fantasy series, one set in a world in which two warring agencies, the Night Watch (which keeps watch over the Dark) and the Day Watch (which keeps an eye on the forces of Light) maintain an uneasy truce that last lasted for centuries.

It’s hard to find a concise description of Sergei Lukyanenko’s ambitious, sprawling six-book Night Watch series (also known as the World of Watches, although that includes a number of stories and books penned by other authors but set in this same world).

Twilight watch sergei lukyanenko