Nightingale - by Laura Elvery (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Mayfair, 1910. At the age of ninety, Florence Nightingale is frail and no longer of sound mind. After a celebrated career as a nurse, writer and statistician, she now leads a reclusive existence. One summer evening she is astonished to receive a visitor: a young man named Silas Bradley, who claims to have met her during the Crimean War fifty-five years ago. But how can this be? And how does the elusive Jean Frawley connect their two lives? In this eagerly anticipated novel, Laura Elvery shows why she is one of the most lauded writers of her generation. Nightingale is a luminous tale of faith and love, bravery and care, and the vitality of women's work.

Review Quotes

'A glorious, glass-sharp novel, raw and powerful, haunting and beautiful. Every sentence Elvery writes fizzes with talent. Nightingale reminded me what great fiction can reveal to us.' Robbie Arnott

'As one would expect in a novel featuring Florence Nightingale, this is a book about war and sacrifice and gendered expectations, but it's also about ambition, desire, time, the drive to be useful and the endlessness of grief. Laura Elvery's characters feel conjured, rather than written: mystical and physically, achingly human at the same time. Nightingale is a remarkable work of invention, scalpel sharp and heroically tender.' Emily Maguire

'Original, brilliant and wise. Nightingale shows the precarious humanity behind any historical myth, and honours in tender, vivid prose the physical and metaphysical dimensions of past lives. A beautiful achievement.' Gail Jones

'Elvery rips the heart out of historical events and leaves it beating on the page. The writing is incandescent. A generous and compassionate account of a history reclaimed. I will be forever haunted by this book.' Kris Kneen

About the Author

Laura Elvery is a writer from Brisbane. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies. Her work has been published in Overland, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, Island and The Big Issue. She has won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature, the Margaret River Short Story Competition, the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and the Fair Australia Prize for Fiction. Laura's latest short story collection, Ordinary Matter, won the 2021 Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection and was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Award for a Work of State Significance.