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by Emil Wilson
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
"The Nightingales is a deeply moving book that brings to vivid life the alienation so many of us have felt on the road to adulthood as it illustrates the transformative power of friendship. 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
This information about The Nightingales was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Emil Wilson is an artist living in San Fransico, California. The Nightingales is his first graphic novel.
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