Emil Wilson with Sophie Yanow - The Nightingales

TUESDAY, AUG 4!

I'm very excited to participate in the San Francisco book launch for The Nightingales with Emil Wilson.

The book is amazing. I've participated in a lot of crits in ten years of teaching. Emil was not my student, but I was in residence with him at Bundanon, Australia for the Comic Art Workshop and participated in a crit of this book - one of the two times in all these years of crits that I was moved to tears. A coming of age story, family story, and intergenerational story about AIDS in the 90s. Come for the launch. Read the book.

Info from the bookstore:

Tue, 8/4/2026- 5:30pm

Place:
Book Passage Ferry Building
1 Ferry Building
San Francisco, CA 94111

BUY THE BOOK

"A coming-of-age story for the ages. All ages. For anyone who has lived through loss (and who hasn’t?), The Nightingales is a blessing sung after the tears have slowed down. This book is a triumph.” —Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked

Based on a true story, an exquisitely rendered, singular graphic novel about a life-changing friendship between a seventeen-year-old girl and the dying stranger who moves into her family’s home.

Emil will be joined in conversation by award-winning artist and writer Sophie Yanow. 

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ABOUT THIS EVENT

• This event will be hosted by Book Passage at our SF Ferry Building store.
• Free Admission / Open Seating
• Following the presentation, there will be a signing line or a meet-and-greet.
• If you are unable to attend the event, you can still get your copy by clicking the "BUY THE BOOK" button above. If you would like a signed or personalized book, please note that in the order comment field.
• For any questions regarding our events, please contact us at books@bookpassage.com.
• SUBSCRIBE TO OUR E-NEWSLETTER 
• SUPPORT OUR EVENTS PROGRAM

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It’s the spring of 1985. Emil Wilson’s father, Donald, invites his coworker Jim and his two Pomeranians, Henny and Penny, to move into his family’s home. What he doesn’t tell his wife, Annemarie, or his daughter, Lou, is that Jim has AIDS.

Months before Rock Hudson’s diagnosis shocked the public and ushered in a new era of awareness for the crisis, AIDS is a news story that happens in faraway places to faraway people, and Jim’s presence in the house turns this small-town Oregon family upside down. As Annemarie’s fear and resentment grows, resulting in increasingly bitter fights with the gentle and stubborn Donald, so too does Lou’s unlikely friendship with Jim (and Henny and Penny)—a friendship that not only buoys Jim through the most difficult parts of his illness, but is a catalyst for Lou to finally pursue her truest and bravest self in the bigger world.

The Nightingales is an unforgettable portrait of an imperfect family grappling with extraordinary circumstances, and a powerful example of how confronting the unknown with curiosity and compassion is the first step to building a better world.

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"Emil Wilson’s The Nightingales is a book awash with tenderness, with the audacity and courage to make a room for kindness, with art that performs on each and every page the beautiful and most humane acts of remembering—particular, impressionistic, incomplete, eidetic, afire with humor and compassion. Here is an extraordinary achievement that takes history and offers it to the future as the most forgiving gift." —Mark Z. Danielewski, New York Times bestselling author of House of Leaves

“The Nightingales is a deeply moving book that brings to vivid life the alienation so many of us have felt on the road to adulthood as it illustrates the transformative power of friendship. I was overwhelmed with emotion on every page of this gorgeous graphic work. Emil Wilson manages to convey the quirky joys as well as the horrors of the 1980s—highlighting the relentless nightmare of the early days of AIDS—while also speaking to issues that couldn’t be more current. Here is a book that richly deserves a place alongside coming-of-age classics like Running with Scissors and Fun Home.” —Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club 

"The Nightingales is one of the most moving, impactful, and beautiful books I've experienced in a long time. I devoured it in one sitting. I laughed, I cursed, I gasped, I cried my face off. The illustrations are gorgeous, smart, compelling; the storytelling is nuanced and poignant, yet funny. A unique and deeply-felt story about the relationship between a teenager, her family, two Pomeranians, and a man dying of AIDS in the mid-80s, The Nightingales is a tender, heartbreaking, and unforgettable look at the early days of the AIDS crisis in a small town in Oregon—it's also a reminder of what it means to live now." —Kate Schatz, New York Times bestselling author of Rad American History A-Z