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

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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. 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. The Somerset Levels is a fascinating area for wildlife, quite different from the rest of the West Country. 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.

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.I know when I first came to England, I was stunned by the deep green of the hills, the bluebells, the daffodils coming out so early… but have forgotten to marvel at all of this now, after living here so long. 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.

What elevates this book further for me is his ability to draw links to the politics of such a move, and this book is not naive about the very present realities for many people moving across countries. 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. His voice is fresh, passionate, and beautifully attuned to the layers of enchantment and melancholy that emerge from the living world in today's challenging times.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. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.

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. 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. 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. 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?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. 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.