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

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Malay’s version of nature writing, indeed, is thronged with other presences — not for him the windswept, empty uplands so memorably described by Kathleen Jamie as the haunt of the “lone, enraptured male”. This is a book about falling in love with vanishing thingsLate 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.

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. That was a really good aspect to it, and gave fascinating info about those creatures – I wasn’t so bad with moths as we have an interest in those, but knew little about eels and mussels! Theresa May's 'hostile environment' for migrants is name-checked explicitly, commenting on how the ways we talk about people and nature can be wildly different, despite the unity we should be feeling.

For readers 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. 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. 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”. He spent his early years in Jakarta, Indonesia, before moving to Australia with his family at the age of ten.

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. 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. 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. 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. Neuware -'Late Light brings the refreshing perspective of someone who goes from seeing England as a foreign place to someone who deeply studies its secret wonders.They were like pebbles found on a beach, shapely and good to hold, and some opened strange vistas onto the past. Most nature books claim to make the world feel bigger and more precious, but Late Light really does. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions.

In underscoring the concept of basic dignity as being the right of all species, and illuminating the idea of an expansive, planetary politics, Malay offers a bright, fierce hope for the future. 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. Told through the stories of four ‘uncharismatic’ creatures – eels, moths, freshwater pearl mussels, crickets – and Michael’s forays into their dwindling worlds, his is an inventive and curious account of modern extinction. So then he looks at eels, moths, mussels and crickets, speaking to experts, going on field trips, sometimes alone sometimes with a friend, becoming addicted to each creature in turn.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. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. It is a lyrical work of ecology and nature writing that focuses upon four 'uncharismatic' species, the eel, the moth, the mussel and the cricket, and uses them to tell a story that shows how amazing they are from a non-anthropocentric perspective.

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. 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. Through his journeys to understand the lives of four "unloved" animals, Michael Malay pays a debt of deep respect to the Earth and its interconnectedness. 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. 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! It is mostly set around Bristol and the South West, which makes it of additional interest if you are local. Malay's prose is gorgeous and astute; he looks with fresh eyes at unpopular species and finds poetry and meaning. 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?