Elvery’s prose is both sensual and brutal in this richly imagined account of war, memory and the life of history’s most famous nurse

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The year is 1850, the eve of the Crimean war, and Florence Nightingale is watching a group of boys at play. From a distance, she composes the scene, preparing to describe it in a letter to her aunt. “How did she want this part to sound?” she wonders – less concerned with what is happening than how it might be narrated. When she realises the boys are not kicking a ball but tormenting a baby owl, she doesn’t recoil. The horror of the image lands alongside another realisation: the story “might be better” now, though she is left considering how best to reframe the violence for her aunt: “Knowing she would narrate it later back in the house … Florence would have to tell the story a different way”. That instinct – to reshape the unbearable into something legible – sits at the core of Nightingale, Laura Elvery’s rich and exacting novel about violence, care and memory.

In 1910, a young English soldier, Silas Bradley, appears on Florence’s doorstep, claiming they met during the Crimean war half a century before. He’s confused, searching for answers about lives that looped briefly and painfully around his own; his appearance also forces Florence to confront ghosts in her own past.

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