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

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What stayed with Niala, however, were the unexpected bonds that the young men made with the more-than-human gardeners they worked with – their excitement at finding earthworms, the sunflowers planted to extract excess zinc from the soil that created a neighbourhood meeting place. What happens to nature writing when our access to the great outdoors becomes restricted? We asked writers to reflect on their personal experience of the past year and tell us about their small journeys into the outside world. Those patches of ground, water and sky close at hand which somehow seem more precious now that our access to the outdoors has become so strictly rationed. In episode five, writer Michael Malay takes us to the nature reserve in his East Bristol neighborhood. 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. Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety. Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety. 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. 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. An astonishing read.' - Amy Liptrot, The Outrun

Late Light is a book of little revelations. It approaches small things with a quiet and tender profundity, and its attentiveness to the quivering of life will leave you aching with world-love.’– Abi Andrews, The Word for Woman is Wilderness You may also like… Before we had parted ways in Inverness, Iain had taken me to a small library in his office and reached for a book called The Summer Walkers . ‘Read this,’ he said, pressing the book into my hands, and for the rest of the afternoon, while he carried on with his work, I found myself in a different world. Written by Timothy Neat, the book offers a remarkable account of an old way of life – one it records without any hint of romanticism or nostalgia – and more than any other, it was this book that showed me the depth of the historical relationship between mussels and humans.Michael Malay is a lecturer in English literature and the environmental humanities at the University of Bristol. He has published articles on poetry, critical theory and animal studies, as well as creative non-fiction on eels, migration and climate change. He is currently working on a book called Late Light, which is about the lives of unloved or disregarded animals on the brink of extinction. 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. 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. The industrial past of east Bristol has left a unique ecosystem in its wake, allowing the flora and fauna to thrive in the now protected nature reserve. 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. An astonishing read.’– Amy Liptrot, The Outrun This 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. Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety.

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. 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. 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? 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. Neil Hegarty 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. Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety. 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. The disappearance of a species is always a plural event, because it involves the unravelling of an interconnected world 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.

Late Light is a book that glows with warmth in spite of its dark subtext. Malay's prose is gorgeous and astute; he looks with fresh eyes at unpopular species and finds poetry and meaning. His voice is irresistible - Late Light is a powerful new work of nature writing. ' - Sara Baume, Seven Steeples Last year, over 300 insects were identified at Troopers Hill, many of which are nationally scarce species — a remarkable boast for such a small nature reserve! Despite coal mining ceasing many decades ago, tiny mineshafts can still be seen all over the hill; but these are ongoing works from mining bees! What would vanish from the world if pearl mussels became extinct? And what kind of disappearance might take place in rivers, as well as in us? 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. 'Late Light is a book that glows with warmth in spite of its dark subtext. Malay's prose is gorgeous and astute; he looks with fresh eyes at unpopular species and finds poetry and meaning. A clear ethic of respect animates Eddie’s account of fishing. In his remarks to Neat, he explains how traditional pearl-fishers would leave whole colonies untouched, to ensure they did not overharvest from any one river. By contrast, the fishermen who started ‘coming up in droves’ after Bill Abernathy’s famous discovery would ‘work the river like a factory’. ‘They slaughtered the Tay’, and when they came up to the Spey, ‘they slaughtered it’ as well. ‘It was greed,’ Eddie continued, since it violated one of the core principles of the traditional pearl-fishers. ‘We would know which shells to open,’ he said, explaining how one could tell apart a ‘crook’ (a slightly deformed mussel which was more likely to contain a pearl) from a non-crook. But the newcomers ‘would open every shell – wee shells, smooth shells – and that was that! They wiped the rivers clean.’

In 1996, Neat began interviewing members of Scotland’s travelling community. At the time, fewer than five thousand were ‘living a traditional semi-nomadic lifestyle,’ he writes, with fewer still ‘living the old migratory lifestyle in bow-tents’ – ‘probably less than fifty’. The aim of The Summer Walkers , he explains, was to ‘document aspects of that life’ while they are ‘still fresh in the minds of individuals who spent extended periods of their lives on the road’. 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. The hill has been transformed’ said Dr Malay. ‘Rubble has been dumped here, chemicals have contaminated the soil, and the face of the hill has been dug into and chipped away. And all this has altered the very nature of the place.’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. Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety. 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. Fragments of Bristol’s industrial past can be seen all over the city. At Troopers Hill, in east Bristol, you can not only see the city’s past in the street names, but in the abandoned quarry and the 16-metre-tall chimney that looms over the landscape. Though Troopers Hill was once a hive of labour and industry, it is now a nature reserve with a flourishing and unique ecosystem. The chimney on Troopers Hill, with the quarry beneath it | Meerabai Kings