The Watch That Ends the Night

Hugh MacLennan

May 2009 · McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

About this ebook

George and Catherine Stewart share not only the burden of Catherine's heart disease, which could cause her death at any time, but the memory of Jerome Martell, her first husband and George's closest friend. Martel, a brilliant doctor passionately concerned with social justice, is presumed to have died in a Nazi prison camp. His sudden return to Montreal precipitates the central crisis of the novel. Hugh MacLennan takes the reader into the lives of his three characters and back into the world of Montreal in the thirties, when politics could send an idealist across the world to Spain, France, Auschwitz, Russia, and China before his return home.

About the author

John Hugh MacLennan was born in Glace Bay, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia on March 20, 1907. He was educated at Dalhousie University, Oxford University, and Princeton University. He taught English at Lower Canada College and McGill University. His first book, Barometer Rising, was published in 1941. His other works included Each Man's Son, Return of the Sphinx, Voices in Time, and The Other Side of Hugh MacLennan. He won the Governor General's Literary Award three times for fiction for Two Solitudes, The Precipice, and The Watch that Ends the Night and twice for nonfiction for Cross-Country and Thirty and Three. He also won a Royal Bank Award in 1984 and in 1987 he became the first Canadian to receive Princeton University's James Madison Medal. He died on November 7, 1990.