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

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I adored this beautiful and thoughtful story of Michael Malay's life in the UK, and how he can chart his relationship with the world through its nature.

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”. Malay’s prose is gorgeous and astute; he looks with fresh eyes at unpopular species and finds poetry and meaning. 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.

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. 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. Each year for eons, millions of juvenile eels have journeyed east from the Sargasso Sea to the rivers of Europe: to rest, grow, feed, and at last swim west again across the Atlantic to spawn and die. 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 Somerset Levels is a fascinating area for wildlife, quite different from the rest of the West Country.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. Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety. It is mostly set around Bristol and the South West, which makes it of additional interest if you are local. 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.