On an ordinary Saturday morning in 1996, the residents of Nightingale Point wake up to their normal lives and worries. 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 debut novel by a Costa Short Story Award winner was Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and was a Radio 2 Book Club pick.
This month’s read was a bit of a slow starter with several members saying that they had taken a while to get into it. We agreed that we’d been concerned that it was going to be a thinly disguised story about Grenfell (with an aeroplane instead of a fire). However, once we read the acknowledgements at the back of the book, we learned that the author had based her story on an airline crash in the Netherlands in the early 1990s. This didn’t make us much more comfortable about the subject matter, but when the story got moving, we felt more involved and less uneasy.
The random community sharing a tower block in South London was very believable, and although there were multiple points of view, we were able to identify who was talking quite quickly. Each character had a very distinctive voice and this moved the story along quickly. While there seemed to be layers of deception in the story, this also made it more realistic. Everyone, with their very different backgrounds, was equally flawed and struggling.
There were a lot of main characters, and several lesser ones (such as Mary’s husband who makes a fatally brief appearance in London, and Pamela’s dad who makes an equally fatal decision – although not for him – when he locks her in the flat). However a character who doesn’t get his own point of view but is of equal importance is Harris. He kindly takes in Malachi and Tristan, even though he isn’t related to them, but we only really see him from Mary, Malachi or Tristan’s points of view.
We did have some questions about Pamela. The book mentions that several people saw her locked in the flat while they were managing to escape. However nobody seems to have told anyone in authority who might have been able to rescue her. Admittedly in Tristan’s case this is understandable, as he loses consciousness and is rescued by Elvis. Speaking of Elvis, he was definitely a book group favourite and we warmed to his attempts to understand the world. He does what is right, as much as possible, even when he doesn’t understand what is happening.
We felt that the book didn’t really resolve at the end, which was disappointing. We did like the way that the book focused on people who are often overlooked in society. It showed how people dealt with issues such as poverty, racism and domestic abuse, and gave the characters a voice.
In a rare unanimous decision, we scored this 3/5 and while we wouldn’t race to read anything else she has written, she might still appear on a TBR pile.
A mysterious Tokyo librarian, Sayuri Komachi, has a unique ability to sense what people truly need and recommends the perfect book to guide them. Five individuals at different life crossroads seek her help, each searching for purpose, change, or direction—and through her guidance, they may discover what they’re really looking for.
Come and pick up your copy from the Library in GETEC and join our next Teams meeting on Thursday 6th August at 12.30pm.
If you can’t make it, you can still borrow the book and let us know your thoughts!
Find out more about our reading groups here or why not take a look at some of our previous book reviews?
We look forward to seeing you!