Join us at Riverbend where we present the second new series of events : Ask The Author

At these events, the audience become the interviewers!

Fiona Stager will be on hand to moderate this event with Laura, at which you are invited to ask the author any questions you may have about her book and her writing process. Guests are encouraged to read Laura’s fantastic novel, Nightingale, prior to the event, but are of course welcome to come along with no prior knowledge of the book if they wish.

Join us for what promises to be a fascinating evening!

About the Book …

Inspired by the life of Florence Nightingale, this literary gem is part historical fiction, part ghost story, and utterly original.

Mayfair, 1910. At the age of ninety, Florence Nightingale is frail and no longer of sound mind. After a storied career as a nurse, writer and statistician, she now leads a reclusive existence.

One summer evening she is astonished to receive a visitor- a young man named Silas Bradley, who claims to have met her during the Crimean War fifty-five years ago. But how can this be? And how does the elusive Jean Frawley connect their two lives?

 In this eagerly anticipated novel, Laura Elvery shows why she is one of the most lauded writers of her generation. Nightingale is a luminous tale of faith and love, bravery and care, and the vitality of women's work.

About the Author…

Laura Elvery is the author of Trick of the Light and Ordinary Matter, which won the 2021 Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection and was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance and the 2022 Barbara Jefferis Award. Her work has been published in numerous literary journals and she has won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature, the Margaret River Short Story Competition, the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and the Fair Australia Prize for Fiction. Nightingale is her first novel. She lives in Brisbane.