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?

Elvery’s transition to the longer novel format is faultlessly executed, but some of the fragmentation of the short story medium is retained in her luminous, exacting prose, giving it a deeply compelling, unique and almost kaleidoscopic tone. The entire book is a haunting and thought-provoking achievement: a considered, poignant exploration of the many faces of Florence Nightingale, and a powerful vindication of bravery, care and women’s work. Ellie Dean, Readings Books

Rich and exacting […] The physical world of Nightingale is rendered in extraordinary detail […] Nightingale is a luminous, fragmentary exploration of what war takes from those who are not asked to fight. Seren Hayman-Griffiths, Guardian Australia

Elvery resists mythmaking. Her Nightingale is not a saint, but a woman forged in complexity: brilliant, stubborn, sometimes difficult. The novel invites us to see her not as a symbol, but as a person shaped by illness, desire, pain and time. Nightingale is not just a novel about Florence Nightingale, or about nursing. It’s about the physical and emotional labour of care, and the people whose work often goes unnoticed. Caitlin Macdonald, The Conversation