The Night Watch

The Night Watch is a fantasy novel by the Russian writer Sergei Lukyanenko, published in English in 2006 in a translation by Andrew Bromfield. It is the first of his books about the Others to appear in English, and it is set in contemporary Moscow.

The Others are people with powers that ordinary humans do not have, and they belong either to the Light or to the Dark. The two sides fought one another for a long time and then settled on a treaty that has maintained the balance between them for a thousand years, with each side watching the other to see that the terms are kept.

The truce depends on a balance that a single powerful individual could upset. A prophecy holds that one Other will eventually appear who is strong enough to decide the conflict, and when a boy with extraordinary abilities emerges, the first part of the prophecy is judged to have been fulfilled. The novel follows the agents of the Light as they try to keep the Dark from getting hold of him.