The Nightingale Papers

In this darkly satirical fiction debut, a harmless joke thrown in after one glass of wine too many triggers a chain of vengeful plots, grotesque confrontations, and literary hoaxes. World experts on Madoc, the great 18th-century poet, are assembling for a celebratory conference in Wales; the setting is an isolated building run by a religious sect advocating purity of mind. It’s a gathering populated by shady, repressed, and unscrupulous academics, whose only means of salvation appears to be through the discovery of an unknown page from the works of a dead writer; but when a new canto from Madoc’s masterpiece appears out of the blue and is presented at the conference, the heat is on. The result can only be literary disaster. In tones reminiscent of Swift and Pope, this piercing black comedy adds a new page to the long British tradition of social satire. David Nokes won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for A Hypocrite Reversed.