Nightingale Point by Luan Goldie

A single dreadful event, on a summer day in 1996, changes the lives of the inhabitants of a city tower block forever. Some of the residents have been living as strangers in neighbouring apartments for decades, others are connected by long gone family traumas and their continual struggle to ‘get by’. No-one affected by the disaster will ever be the same again.

The residents of Nightingale Point survive on low incomes, but a few have occupations that border on the middle class world. Mary is a nurse, Malachi is studying to be an architect and his brother Tristan is in ‘all the top groups’ at school. Any aspirations they may share to achieve a bigger slice of financial success are disappointed, when they are suddenly cast into destitution through no fault of their own. Immediate help is available for their most urgent physical problems, but when it comes to escaping the waking nightmare of emotional loss, they have nobody to rely on but each other.

Malachi, twenty-one, and fifteen-year-old Tristan are fending for themselves in a ninth floor flat. The only claim they have on their neighbour Mary is her long-standing friendship with their absent grandmother, but over the years the three of them have come to think of each other as family. After apalling bad luck destroys their plans, this tenuous connection proves to be strong enough to provide the brothers with hope for the future. Elvis is an outsider at the beginning of the story, but because he knows that ‘you cannot leave people behind,’ he finds a route to belonging. The most heartbreaking character in the novel is seventeen-year-old Pamela, whose attempt to escape loneliness through a romance with Malachi comes to a tragic end, because of her father’s brutality.

Goldie introduces her characters gradually, getting the reader involved in the everyday problems of their lives. When catastrophe strikes, they are separated. Suspense builds, while each of them deals with trauma in their own way before the ‘family’ can be reunited. At this point it seems impossible that human kindness will be enough to prevent some individuals from collapsing into despair. Although the story has an upbeat ending, the reader is left with a sense of enduring anger and constant, never-ending struggle.

I liked the generational balance in the novel, and the way the hopeless love of two very young people is reflected in a tortured, but ultimately life-affirming, affair between an older couple.

‘Nightingale Point’ is published by HQ.