The Nightingale of Covent Garden

For readers of Sadeqa Johnson and Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, an immersive, high-stakes historical adventure set in eighteenth-century London, where a young woman on the brink of fame and her father, both fugitives from enslavement, must fight to define – and defend – their freedom.

Fortunes can change in a single moment. Pearl was little more than an infant when her father, Daniel, seized his chance and fled with her from their life of enslavement on a Jamaican sugarcane plantation. They found their way to London, where Pearl, now 16, delights in her blossoming singing career and the acclaim it brings.

While Daniel works alongside the Brotherhood of Crows to shield black men, women, and children from injustice, he tries to protect Pearl too. A career as a performer can be ruinous for a young lady, and as the potential heir to a fortune, he fears for her future respectability. But claiming that inheritance—promised to him for saving a Major’s life in battle—is a dangerous venture when powerful white men controlling the legal channels are determined to thwart him and see Daniel enslaved again, or worse.

In the face of her father’s disapproval, Pearl finds another sort of family in the theatre, one that is exhilarating yet fraught with rivalry and sabotage. Romance and fame are within tantalizing reach until a devastating betrayal brings moral and physical peril into her life.

From the dank tunnels of the St. Giles rookery, home to London’s outcasts, to the glittering stages of Covent Garden above, Pearl struggles to chart her own course in a world filled with opportunity and pitfalls, where desperation and ambition—including her own—can alter destiny at any time . . .