Nightingale Point
Nightingale Point by Luan Goldie
Reviewed by Linda
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It’s 1996. Take That have broken up and the Spice Girls are at the top of the charts, Ellesse and Kappa tracksuits are all the rage, England is getting ready for the Euros and all the cool kids are on their Windows 95’s trying to get a dial-up connection. What a time to be alive!
However, we are drawn to the residents of Nightingale Point, an East London block of flats, as their world is torn apart by a devastating plane crash.
Goldie takes us on a rollercoaster of the domestic lives of the residents before the event to many years later. We are intimate with their routines and familiar with their hopes and dreams and aspirations beyond the four walls of their respective homes. We meet students, youths, adults and working professionals from all walks of life.
Drawing from the 1992 cargo plane crash into a Netherlands block of flats and the horrific Grenfell Tower fire atrocity in 2017, what I read was fiction but simultaneously all too familiar real life. What I read about was a London in the 90s, and still is London in a lot of places that haven’t been gentrified by a local council, or flocked with artsy food markets or unaffordable high-rise new-builds.
Being a 90s kid, I nodded in agreement to many situations which made the read all the more personal for me.
Not everyone comes out alive and not every character is likeable or innocent - Goldie makes sure that everything is real and original, and as you devour this book, page by page, you won’t question a single event/conversation/detail for its authenticity!
