Mar 6

Mar 6 Nightingale Point

Author: Luan Goldie
Publisher: HarperCollins (US edition)
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

One ordinary day. One extraordinary event. Their lives changed forever.

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.

TL;DR Review

Nightingale Point is a novel packed with great characters in situations that highlight the complexity of emotions and trauma. I liked it.

For you if: You like emotional, multi-POV novels.

Full Review

Nightingale Point was longlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize, and I’m glad it was, because I’m not sure I would have heard about it or picked it up otherwise. I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but I’m actually coming to appreciate it even more the longer it sits with me.

Inspired by true events, the story features a set of characters who all live in an apartment complex called Nightingale Point. Then one day, there’s a terrible tragedy, and it destroys pretty much everything they know. The rest of the novel is dedicated to the examination of all their different manifestations of trauma and steps toward healing.

What I think I liked best about this book was the really complex emotional situations she put her characters in. It’s not just the trauma from the event itself — it’s the twisty, layered, and sharply realistic way their very selves respond to that trauma, internalize it, and seek to heal. I also ended up listening to this one’s audiobook (which was great, btw), and the multiple-narrator cast really brought all these characters to life.

If you are one for multiple POVs and a close look at what makes us human, you might like this one too.