Mister Nightingale

After a thirty-year exile in Toronto, self-described 'mid-listing' Newfoundland author James Nightingale leaves behind a failed marriage to a successful classical musician, who has taken up with an avant-garde composer, and a middling, if critically successful, career to return temporarily to St. John's to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater. Braving the obstacles of artistic and domestic uncertainty and neglected family obligations-not to mention a book-signing and a launch that go risibly wrong-he meets old friends whose own artistic lives have borne little fruit, and contends with a talented daughter who, in defiance of her mother, has abandoned her classical-music roots in favor of performing 'deconstructed' traditional Newfoundland songs, a father suffering from dementia but with a sharp memory of disappointment, and an untrustworthy former publisher who is re-releasing his seminal first novel. Imbued with the language of literature, the imagery of a Newfoundland in flux, and the grace of an author at the height of his powers, Mister Nightingale is at once a diatribe on the vicissitudes of the writing life, and a keen and poignant exploration of one man's coming to terms with the 'prevailing anxieties' of la vie quotidienne.