Join us at Books@Stones on 27 May for a special in-conversation event celebrating Nightingale by Laura Elvery, in-conversation with Mirandi Riwoe.

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.

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.

Mirandi Riwoe is the author of Stone Sky Gold Mountain, which won the 2020 Queensland Literary Award – Fiction Book Award and the inaugural ARA Historical Novel Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize and longlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Her short story collection, The Burnished Sun, includes the novella, The Fish Girl, which won Seizure Viva la Novella and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her latest novel is Sunbirds. Her work has appeared in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin, Review of Australian Fiction, Griffith Review and Best Summer Stories. Mirandi has a PhD in Creative Writing and Literary Studies and lives in Brisbane.