Nightingale
by Laura Elvery

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

A$32.99

(Paperback)

Ships on 29/04/2025

Overview

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.

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Reviews

Robbie Arnott

‘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.’

Emily Maguire

‘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.’

Gail Jones

‘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.’

Kris Kneen

‘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.’

Laura Elvery

Laura Elvery is the author of Trick of the Light and Ordinary Matter, which 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 and the 2022 Barbara Jefferis Award. Her work has been published in numerous literary journals and 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. Nightingale is her first novel. She lives in Brisbane.