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

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, 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

The Nightingales is a book filled with heart and warmth and colour. Though there is loss and grief at its core, it sings about freedom and the vivid urgency of life. Inspiring and full of hope, it’s a book whose soul stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page

Seán Hewitt, author of Open, Heaven

Tender and humane, I loved this book

Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

A beautiful, honest book about friendship and family

Lizzy Stewart, author of The Wreck

The Nightingales is as brilliant as it is beautiful, a study in family and kindness, of doing the right thing, of not the doing the right thing, of surviving a home fraught with dysfunction. Emil Wilson shows us that under duress some people can show immense kindness and warmth while others just falter and wither. The Nightingales is a serious gem

Willy Vlautin, author of The Left and the Lucky

This graphic novel is stunning in every way. Wilson forgos panels in favor of a format that is part sketchbook, part journal, and part scrapbook—a choice that gives both the visuals and the narrative room to breathe. The artwork has an intimacy and immediacy that complements the text beautifully, and the vibrant color palette communicates the joy that the relationship between Lou and Jim brings them both. Sensitive but blunt and mordantly funny, Lou is a great narrator. Jim is also a wonderfully well-crafted character. He is, by turns, charming and sentimental and ironic and angry . . . Absolutely gorgeous, visually and emotionally

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

An achievement in visual storytelling . . . A deeply personal look at how the stigma of AIDS affected the quality of care and level of empathy received by those lost and a heartbreaking tale of how even the briefest of touches on someone’s life can last a lifetime and beyond.

Booklist, starred review

A singularly beautiful book, the subtlety of its layered and playful visuals a match for the emotional intricacies of this family drama and coming of age story.

Emma Donoghue, author of Room