Nightingales

It is 1994, the year of the OJ Simp­son saga, Tony Blair’s rise to the lead­er­ship of the Labour Par­ty, and South Africa’s first ful­ly mul­ti-racial elec­tions. Nola Marks is a Lon­don night­club host­ess with an art his­to­ry degree and itchy feet. She is seduced by a wealthy pub­lish­er, who tempts her with the offer of a job and promis­es to trans­form her life. Instead, over the course of the fol­low­ing sev­en months, her pro­fes­sion­al and emo­tion­al worlds are turned upside down, as exter­nal forces impact in unex­pect­ed ways. Set ten years on from Tableaux, the author’s debut nov­el, the nar­ra­tive cuts between diver­gent nation­al cul­tures and dif­fer­ent social tribes. With pho­tographs by Jamie Noise, Nightin­galescom­bines art and sto­ry­telling in a com­pelling hybrid form.

Dominic Jay is a for­mer arts jour­nal­ist. His pro­fes­sion­al life gave him access to peo­ple and places that are usu­al­ly inac­ces­si­ble, and sev­er­al of the char­ac­ters in this, his sec­ond, nov­el are drawn from life. As he says, ​‘all writ­ers are voyeurs’. His first nov­el, Tableaux, was pub­lished in 2023.

Jamie Noise is an artist, pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and film­mak­er whose dis­tinc­tive style blends vin­tage aes­thet­ics with vibrant con­tem­po­rary glam­our. Dri­ven by a love of sto­ry­telling, his pho­tographs weave intrigu­ing nar­ra­tives around a cast of strik­ing­ly beau­ti­ful but mys­te­ri­ous characters.