Stunned faces turn towards a London tower block “lit up like a flare”. Dense smoke pours from its flame-filled windows and burning debris falls to the ground. Within, there’s “a panic of footsteps” as unimaginable heat sucks the very air from the building, turning lives to ash.
Many of the images conjured up in Luan Goldie’s able, measured debut novel evoke the burned-out spectre of Grenfell Tower. But it takes its cue from another tragedy, more distant in time and place. On 4 October 1992, a cargo plane crashed into two high-rise blocks of flats in the Bijlmer, a working-class district of Amsterdam, killing more than 40 people. Four years later, on a warm day in early May, the residents of Goldie’s titular block of council flats find their worlds shattered by a similar aviation disaster.
Among them are Malachi, a broken-hearted student who is struggling to raise his streetwise kid brother, Tristan; Mary, the salty Filipino nurse with a secret life she keeps from her family; Pamela, a teenage athlete whose father has become her jailer; and vulnerable Elvis, who loves his new home, with its laminated instructions and the fridge filled by his carer. Their perspectives – each distinct and believable, even if some feel more authentic than others – define alternating chapters as the sirens rise and fall.
“Getting out of the building should have been the hardest thing we had to do,” one survivor says to another. “But sometimes it feels like that was only the start.” Accordingly, the novel is barely halfway through when a crane arrives to remove the plane’s carcass, and its final scene takes place on the crash’s fifth anniversary. In the intervening pages, race, politics, urban community and mental health all feed into the struggles faced by survivors. Ultimately, though, theirs is a story of love at its most tenacious, a story of love and resilience.
Goldie, a primary school teacher who won the 2017 Costa short story award and has been mentored by Courttia Newlandcorr as part of a scheme for emerging authors of colour, is a warm, confident writer with the lightest of touches. Her ear for dialogue is acute and her pacing near-faultless. She can be funny, too. Tristan notes, after hearing some sixth form girls describe his brother as “dark and brooding”: “That apparently doesn’t just mean he’s black and grumpy.”
All the indications are that Nightingale Point was begun long before Grenfell. In an author’s note, Goldie refers to the tragedy directly, declaring her novel a tribute to those whose fight to rebuild their lives continues. To her considerable credit, she’s managed to create a world that does this in such a way as to make the book relevant without seeming opportunistic.
• Nightingale Point by Luan Goldie is published by HQ (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
