Late Light: 'An astonishing read' - AMY LIPTROT, AUTHOR OF THE OUTRUN

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It really captures something about the way our focus and experience of the world shifts, dilates and contracts in the moment as we move through it and encounter it. Late Light' is the story of Michael Malay's own journey, an Indonesian-Australian-American making a home for himself in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines. Late Light is the story of Michael Malay’s own journey, an Indonesian Australian making a home for himself in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines. By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Malay’s prose is gorgeous and astute; he looks with fresh eyes at unpopular species and finds poetry and meaning.

Amy Liptrot, The Outrun This is a book about falling in love with vanishing things Late Light is the story of Michael Malay's own journey, an Indonesian Australian making a home for himself in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines. For fans of Robert Macfarlane, Raynor Winn and Helen Macdonald, Late Light is a rich blend of memoir, natural history, nature writing, and a meditation on being and belonging, from a vibrant new voice. This book considers the miraculous life cycles of a small group of species — eel, cricket, moth, mussel — and explains in pitiless detail the reasons for their looming extinction at our hands.I finished reading it and went for a walk on Troopers Hill with my family a couple of days later, which is the place on the front cover of the book. There are fascinating points about land that is reclaimed by nature that fits in with the rewilding books I’ve been reading, but going deeper into smaller areas again. Early in Late Light, Michael Malay’s astonishing account of a journey through the natural world, the author peers down into a water-filled bucket. When Michael Malay came to England at twenty-one, he was enchanted by the green and pleasant land he had read so much about.

For where is the essential difference between human lives ground down by economic austerity and homelessness, and animal lives marginalised into extinction by disappearing habitats and poisoned water? This book is filled with genuinely thought provoking and sometimes quite touching reflections on things like the nature of home, the solace of friendship and community, loss, paying attention to the world outside of yourself, and the plurality of the tragedy taking place under our noses. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. Recounting how his moves across countries often left him feeling like a migratory bird himself, his utter joy and passion for the natural world is stunningly rendered in this book. He also draws parallels with types of people and different places, for example the long migration patterns of eels bringing to mind the journeys of migrants and refugees and the blocks to their journeys, just as eels are now blocked by modern land use patterns, both experiencing “perilous journeys”.They were like pebbles found on a beach, shapely and good to hold, and some opened strange vistas onto the past. There is a sharp, glittering edge in Malay’s vision and philosophy — for in melding animal and human stories, he creates a single continuum into which many futures can be folded. This island that looked, from the heart of the Mendip Hills, like an oasis of interconnected ecosystems, was the site of more losses than we can count. It's also peppered with lots of very interesting natural and social history that is weaved throughout the memoir, and takes subjects that can seem quite remote and academic (migration patterns, ecology) and not only makes them feel very interesting and immediate but also shows (in a very unsermonising way) how alienated we've become from the natural world. He does pop to Scotland for mussels but a lot of it is deeply rooted in the West Country (my ancestral home, too) and it’s just great.

Patterns on moths remind him of his grandmother’s sarongs and lists of cave paintings include Lascaux, Altamira and Sulawesi: by dint of his heritage, Malay makes his book seamlessly inclusive and with an expansive world view. With presences, and with danger: for the enfeebled environment that dooms so many species will inevitably doom us too; there is, in the end, no escape. Late Light is the story of Michael Malay's own journey, an Indonesian Australian making a home for himself in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines. Malay's prose is gorgeous and astute; he looks with fresh eyes at unpopular species and finds poetry and meaning.A chapter from that book, 'American Blue', was recently shortlisted for the Wasafiri Writing Prize (autumn, 2020).

One of the things that I found most engaging about this book is the way it sometimes perfectly captures that sense of the sublime that an encounter with the natural world can provoke, and that brief sensation of the boundaries of the self and the world bleeding into one another. It is about the wonder these animals inspired in our ancestors, the hope they inspire in us, and the joy they might still hold for our children. My family originates from Bridgwater and I have relatives around there and then there’s been a migration all the way to Dorset, where I still have an aunty and cousins!

Coming to the West Country of England via Indonesia and Australia, Malay gives a newcomer’s view of the British countryside, writing with precision, fascination and humour, picking out tiny details that a local might not even notice thanks to familiarity. Amy Liptrot, The OutrunThis is a book about falling in love with vanishing thingsLate Light is the story of Michael Malay's own journey, an Indonesian Australian making a home for himself in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines. Through the close examination of four particular ‘unloved’ animals - eels, moths, crickets and mussels - Michael Malay tells the story of the economic, political and cultural events that have shaped the modern landscape of Britain. Although I had a few books published in July on my NetGalley TBR already, I couldn’t resist requesting this one, as it was described thus: “Late Light is the story of Michael Malay’s own journey, an Indonesian-Australian-American making a home for himself in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines”.