Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Maren Wiederhold
Categories
Historical adventure fiction

NIGHTINGALE

Laura Elvery

Inspired by the life of Florence Nightingale, this literary gem is part historical fiction, part ghost story, and utterly original

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.

Available products
Book Published 2025-04-29 by UQP University of Queensland Press - St Lucia (AUS)

Comments

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.

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.

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.

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.