Nightingale Point was a BBC Radio 2 Jo Whiley Book Club pick and was Longlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize.
On an ordinary Saturday morning in 1996, the residents of Nightingale Point wake up to their normal lives and worries.
Mary has a secret life that no one knows about, not even Malachi and Tristan, the brothers she vowed to look after. Malachi had to grow up too quickly. Between looking after Tristan and nursing a broken heart, he feels older than his twenty-one years. Tristan wishes Malachi would stop pining for Pamela. No wonder he's falling in with the wrong crowd, without Malachi to keep him straight. Elvis is trying hard to remember to the instructions his care worker gave him, but sometimes he gets confused and forgets things. Pamela wants to run back to Malachi but her overprotective father has locked her in and there's no way out.
It's a day like any other, until something extraordinary happens. When the sun sets, Nightingale Point is irrevocably changed and somehow, through the darkness, the residents must find a way back to lightness, and back to each other.
“This is a moving testament to the endurance of the human spirit”
“Brilliant…touches on race, mental health and community in a fresh way”
“A compelling novel, one in which the humanity of the characters is movingly articulated…finely crafted, compassionate”