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

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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. 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. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. 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.

We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. 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! Michael teaches at the University of Bristol, and this book explores the natural landscape in and around the city from the Mendips to Troopers Hill. 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?That’s a fascinating set of parallels he seems to draw, and I do love the idea of focusing on creatures often neglected (Blyton in Adventures of Pip chose to highlight smaller animals and insects which I loved too). 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. 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”. 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.

During that first year, I also began filling notebooks with words gleaned from books and friends, terms like ‘heath’, ‘upland’ and ‘fen’, or ‘furze’, ‘hart’s tongue’ and ‘goosegrass’, or ‘Icknield Way’ and ‘Fosse Way’. 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. A chapter from that book, 'American Blue', was recently shortlisted for the Wasafiri Writing Prize (autumn, 2020). Worth saying as well, despite how I may have made it sound, this book is eminently readable, and despite the subject matter it's also by no means a depressing read - a little melancholy perhaps, but after reading it I felt more ready to engage with these issues than I have for several months. 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.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”.

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