The Nightingales

The Nightingales

"A coming-of-age story for the ages. All ages. For anyone who has lived through loss (and who hasn’t?), The Nightingales is a blessing sung after the tears have slowed down. This book is a triumph.” —Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked Based on a true story, an exquisitely rendered, singular graphic novel about a life-changing friendship between a seventeen-year-old girl and the dying stranger who moves into her family’s home. It’s the spring of 1985. Emil Wilson’s father, Donald, invites his coworker Jim and his two Pomeranians, Henny and Penny, to move into his family’s home. What he doesn’t tell his wife, Annemarie, or his daughter, Lou, is that Jim has AIDS. Months before Rock Hudson’s diagnosis shocked the public and ushered in a new era of awareness for the crisis, AIDS is a news story that happens in faraway places to faraway people, and Jim’s presence in the house turns this small-town Oregon family upside down. As Annemarie’s fear and resentment grows, resulting in increasingly bitter fights with the gentle and stubborn Donald, so too does Lou’s unlikely friendship with Jim (and Henny and Penny)—a friendship that not only buoys Jim through the most difficult parts of his illness, but is a catalyst for Lou to finally pursue her truest and bravest self in the bigger world. The Nightingales is an unforgettable portrait of an imperfect family grappling with extraordinary circumstances, and a powerful example of how confronting the unknown with curiosity and compassion is the first step to building a better world. "Emil Wilson’s The Nightingales is a book awash with tenderness, with the audacity and courage to make a room for kindness, with art that performs on each and every page the beautiful and most humane acts of remembering—particular, impressionistic, incomplete, eidetic, afire with humor and compassion. Here is an extraordinary achievement that takes history and offers it to the future as the most forgiving gift." —Mark Z. Danielewski, New York Times bestselling author of House of Leaves “Gorgeously illustrated and emotionally piercing, this coming-of-age story set at the height of the AIDs epidemic shows how impactful one friendship can be on the direction of a life. Nuanced, empathetic, and impossible to set down. Highly recommended!” —Maia Kobabe, author of Gender Queer: A Memoir “Told with the utmost care, Emil Wilson’s The Nightingales is exactly the kind of scathing, compassionate, and tragic family portrait that I love the most. I’ve urgently and insistently recommended this to every friend and loved one, so that I might have some company in laughing and crying and savouring this beautifully drawn story.” —Lee Lai, author of Cannon “Deely moving. . . I was overwhelmed with emotion on every page of this gorgeous graphic work. Emil Wilson manages to convey the quirky joys as well as the horrors of the 1980s—highlighting the relentless nightmare of the early days of AIDS—while also speaking to issues that couldn’t be more current. Here is a book that richly deserves a place alongside coming-of-age classics like Running with Scissors and Fun Home .” —Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club Emil Wilson is an artist living in San Fransico, California. The Nightingales is his first graphic novel.