Our Authors
Peter Dorward
Peter Dorward is a GP. He was an inaugural winner of the Canongate Prize and now lives in Edinburgh.
‘I would commend NIGHTINGALE by Peter Dorward as one of my best reads of the year, and it is not even published yet. It is that rare bird, a literary thriller that is not afraid of plot or emotion. In the hours I spent reading this book, no other world existed. And when I was finished and returned to this world, it was with the feeling I had been more than entertained. I would ask no more of any book.
It is a novel about terrorism, the home-grown European terrorism of the Seventies. The terrorist, drawn half-wittingly into the Bologna bombing, is not a monster but a human being. It shows convincingly how idealism, weakness and moral vagueness lead to fellow-travelling in the terrorist world, and its life-long consequences.
Imagine Graeme Greene in ‘entertainment’ mode, without the Catholicism. NIGHTINGALE is literate, emotionally intelligent, humane, passionate – and a page-turning read. From its level of energy and accomplishment I sense there are plenty more novels in Peter Dorward. I greatly look forward to reading them’
Andrew Greig, author of That Summer (Faber & Faber), In Another Light (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Books by Peter Dorward
Nightingale
A literary thriller based on the events surrounding the Bologna train bombing
On the second of August 1980, at 1pm, a bomb, placed under a chair in the second class waiting room of the international railway station in Bologna, exploded, resulting in the deaths of eighty-five people.
Despite indictments and arrests no convictions were ever secured.
Exactly a year before the bombing a young British couple disembarked at the station and walked into town. He - pale-blue eyes, white collarless shirt, baggy green army surplus trousers with anarchy and peace written on the knees, a small, almost coffin shaped case with a brass handle in his left hand. Twenty yards behind him, the woman whom, in a year or two, he will marry, then eventually abandon, to almost everyone’s relief.
He is Don, she Julia. Within twenty fours she’ll leave for home - with the rest of their money - and he will fall in with a ‘bad crowd’ – because he fell in love.
More than twenty years later their daughter Rosie – as naïve as her father was before her - will return to the city, and both Don, and his past will follow …
UK Rights: Two Ravens Press
Other territories: Jenny Brown Associates
94,000 words
