Praise for Flight of the Wild Swan
Georgia Author of the Year Award Finalist
Washington Independent Review of Books “Favorite Books of the Year” selection
BookBrowse “Top Picks” selection
“Reading with Arizona PBS” selection
“Melissa Pritchard makes Nightingale’s heroism even more intimate—and more interesting.” —New York Times Book Review
“Moving and meticulously imagined. . . . A deeply researched novel, told in an inventive and compelling narrative dripping with poetic intensity.” —Rahad Abir, Georgia Author of the Year Awards judge’s citation
“A standout.” —New York Sun
“An awe-inspiring story.” —Denver Post
“An addictive read. . . . [Flight of the Wild Swan] unfolds in short punchy chapters punctuated with snippets of letters, journal entries and other bits of ephemera that help humanize Nightingale and provide insight into her sharp mind.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Unique and intimate. . . . Through vivid storytelling, Pritchard weaves together Nightingale’s early life, her dedication to nursing, and her revolutionary contributions during the Crimean War.” —Georgia Public Broadcasting Narrative Edge
“[Pritchard] offers a moving portrait of a complex human with the courage to change the world and the heart to mourn her own losses as she does. . . . Flight of the Wild Swan is a beautiful accomplishment.” —Washington Independent Review of Books
“In Pritchard’s rich and detailed portrayal of Nightingale, the reader learns not only of a courageous woman . . . but also of the broader structural challenges and constraints women encountered in the nineteenth century. . . . Exceptional.” —Southern Literary Review
“Relying on Nightingale’s copious letters and journals and other documentary evidence, Melissa Pritchard’s dazzling historical novel brings this complex and idiosyncratic woman to exquisite life. . . . Flight of the Wild Swan is a capacious and tremendously written novel, one that blends history, fiction and a nuanced vision of the ‘wild swan’ herself. It is a story to read, reread and share with others.” —BookBrowse
“Pritchard’s splendid latest illuminates the life of Florence Nightingale. . . . Marvelous and moving.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A fresh imagining of an icon. . . . [Florence Nightingale], in Pritchard’s portrayal, is an indomitable force.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“From country houses to city slums and distant war zones, Pritchard renders the people and places of Florence’s world in lush, richly detailed prose. . . . A compelling story and satisfyingly human portrait of an extraordinary woman.” —Booklist
“An inspiring novel about a woman whose single-minded determination comforted and inspired thousands.” —Foreword Reviews
“Powerful.” — Historical Novels Review
“Beautiful, stark and luxuriant.” —Portland Book Review
“Exceptional.” —Midwest Book Review“Flight of the Wild Swan is the best of Melissa Pritchard. It combines her exquisite ear for tone and detail in story, her gift of mystic perception, and her sense of the historic layering of human lives and the events that make our lives absolutely distinct. In this novel, you will come to know Florence Nightingale close up, not as a faraway, distant figure.” —Joy Harjo, author of Poet Warrior: A Memoir and Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light
“Flight of the Wild Swan offers a fascinating immersion in the 19th-century world of drawing rooms and battlefields, crinolines and leeches. Just as vividly, Pritchard’s tour de force evokes nursing and medicine today, when Florence Nightingale’s pioneering contributions are still felt and in which women still struggle for equality. An enchanting, inspiring, and utterly relevant novel.” —Suzanne Koven, MD, author of Letter to a Young Female Physician
“What an amazing book this is. Florence Nightingale—with her insistent spiritual yearning and her work inside the horrors of war—is a large and quite astounding character, evoked by Pritchard in full intellectual depth. The journey this novel takes is mesmerizing and unforgettable.” —Joan Silber, author of Improvement and Secrets of Happiness
Select Praise for Melissa Pritchard
“A writer at the height of her powers.” —Oprah.com
“Emotionally rich.” —New York Times
“The singularity of [Pritchard’s] narrators remains indelible.” —Washington Post
“[Pritchard] takes risks . . . Can she do it all with poetic, vivid prose? With one hand tied behind her back.” —Los Angeles Times
“Pritchard polishes the strange and makes it shine.” —Leslie Jamison, San Francisco Chronicle
“Pritchard’s voice is completely her own and her characters are as unique, wild and magical as she is.” —Tayari Jones
“Pritchard is one of our finest writers.” —Annie Dillard
★ 2023-12-16
A fresh imagining of an icon.
Complicating the image of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) as a saintly ministering angel, Pritchard draws on her subject’s voluminous correspondence and journals to create a nuanced portrait of a woman characterized by one contemporary as “an unsexed creature of narcissism, self-regard, and icy ambition.” Raised in wealth, educated by her erudite father, Nightingale refused to conform to passive, frivolous Victorian womanhood. “I may not know why I was born,” she writes in her commonplace book, “but it cannot be to wage war on dust and broken crockery.” She desperately wants to help her father’s poor, struggling tenants. “I long to live with them,” she admits. “I am drawn to sickness,” she says elsewhere. When she is 17, God speaks to her, calling her to end the world’s suffering, a command that fuels her life’s work. She visits hospitals, orphanages and asylums. She reads government reports on hospital systems and workhouses, taking copious notes. To her mother’s dismay, she refuses a marriage proposal from an ardent suitor, instead pressing her parents for permission to train as a nurse. Living at home, she feels herself becoming “a seething creature, poisoned by rage, with an oversized brain”—until finally her father relents. Pritchard recounts her training in Germany and Paris; her growing reputation; and her intense friendship with statesman Sidney Herbert, who persuades her to lead a contingent of nurses to the Crimea. Faced with filth, vermin, disease, lack of supplies, and hostility from the doctor in charge, Nightingale nevertheless prevails. “‘Nightingale power,’” Pritchard writes, became “a much-used phrase around the hospital, a reference to her uncanny ability to procure whatever she wants by argument, persuasion, donations, use of her own funds, or other more mysterious, coercive, or stealthy means.” God’s selfless and compassionate servant, in Pritchard’s portrayal, is an indomitable force.
A brisk, perceptive narrative.
