In addition to his travel writing, Steven Nightingale is a novelist and poet, and a recipient of the Silver Pen award. He lives in Granada.
This isn't a conventional piece of flit lit by an expat intent on sending up the locals while tending to his smallholding. From sensual celebration of the garden in his carmen, Nightingale moves on to scholarly consideration of the place of the garden in Moorish culture, the history of the barrio beyond it, and then the glories of Al-Andalus, visiting 'provinces of mind and experience' from medicine to music. - The TelegraphAn exuberant and beautifully written book and as packed with information as a pomegranate is with seeds. Steven Nightingale possesses a keen tactile sense of place; his approach is refreshingly sensuous. He delights in the colours, the smells, the voices of Granada; he appreciates the city's contours with his fingertips as well as his eyes. His chapter on the Alhambra is especially fine... we feel the effort he puts in and his resulting delight. So, too, his discussions of Andalusian music are especially moving. The family takes an unabashed, quite sensuous, pleasure in the hospitality, the conversation, the food and wine they share with their new friends. Much of the charm resides in the fact he often seems to observe Granada through the wide-open eyes of his young daughter. This gives his explorations a spontaneity and freshness. - The Wall Street JournalHis book is not only a memoir of one family's communion with a dream house, it's the unearthing of a long-buried dream of civic harmony, a reawakening. Even if you have visited Granada and walked the labyrinthine ways of the Albayzin, Nightingale makes you want to go there again, to see it with new eyes. - The New York TimesEvery sentence sparkles. This book is a love story, a history book, a homage to victims of intolerance and mistrust, a celebration of the magic of human achievement. Read it then book your flight. - BookbagPoet and novelist Nightingale (The Wings of What You Say, 2013, etc.) makes his nonfiction debut in this rhapsodic paean to the Spanish city, where he, his wife and young daughter now live part of each year. A romantic homage to a city 'perfected by catastrophe' and transformed into a place of 'concentrated joy.' - Kirkus ReviewsNone since Gerald Brenan in the 50s has so lovingly mastered Spain in its Gothic, Muslim, Jewish, and Spanish faces. Who reads this book relives all Iberia, from medieval convivencia to Franco nightmare. A profound delight. - Willis Barnstone, author of Sunday Morning in Fascist SpainA fascinating historical overview and an unabashed love song to Granada. - Booklist
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