Melissa Pritchard makes Nightingale’s heroism even more intimate—and more interesting.
Flight of the Wild Swan
Sweeping yet intimate, Flight of the Wild Swan tells the story of Florence Nightingale, a brilliant, trailblazing woman whose humanity has been obscured beneath the iconic weight of legend. From adolescence, Nightingale was determined to fulfill her life’s calling to serve the sick and suffering. Overcoming Victorian hierarchies, familial expectations, patriarchal resistance, and her own illness, she used her hard-won acclaim as a battlefield nurse to bring the profession out of its shadowy, disreputable status and elevate nursing to a skilled practice and compassionate art.
In lush, lyrical detail, Melissa Pritchard reveals Nightingale as a rebel who wouldn’t relent—one whose extraordinary life offers a grand lesson in inspired will.
Washington Independent Review of Books “Favorite Books of the Year” selection
BookBrowse “Top Picks” selection
“Reading with Arizona PBS” selection
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781954276222
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781954276215
Watch Melissa Pritchard discuss Flight of the Wild Swan with Suzanne Koven, MD at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Russell Museum and on PBS’s Arizona Horizon and listen to her talk about the novel on Always Authors, NurseDot Podcast, KMET’s Moments with Marianne, KJZZ’s The Show, Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Narrative Edge, GPB’s All Things Considered, and BBC History Magazine’s HistoryExtra podcast.
Read Melissa Pritchard’s essays on Florence Nightingale’s legacy at The Conversation; her exploration of the parallel lives of Leo Tolstoy and Florence Nightingale at Literary Hub; and her pilgrimage to Istanbul’s former Scutari Barrack Hospital (where Florence Nightingale served in the Crimean War) at Tupelo Quarterly.
Read an excerpt from Flight of the Wild Swan and find rich resources for your book club discussions of the novel at BookBrowse.
Events
Melissa Pritchard, author of Flight of the Wild Swan, at St. Simons Island Casino
The Literary Guild of St. Simons Island welcomes Melissa Pritchard, author of Flight of the Wild Swan, for an author talk and conversation.
Free for members; $10 for non-members; Registration required
Melissa Pritchard is the author of twelve books, including the novels Flight of the Wild Swan and Palmerino, the short story collection The Odditorium, and the essay collection A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write. Among other honors, she has received the Flannery O’Connor Award, Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and Carl Sandburg Literary Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Carson McCullers Center. Emeritus Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University, she is the fiction editor for Image journal and lives in Columbus, Georgia.
visit author page »Praise for Flight of the Wild Swan
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.
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
A remarkable fictional account of the life of one of history’s greatest women.
— Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore (Spokane, WA)