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. 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 When Michael Malay moved to England, the first friends he made were birdwatchers. They taught him the names of the creatures he saw around him: greenfinch, wren, swift, swallow. But they also introduced him to birds that were vanishing, to creatures that, though common in their grandparents’ time, were becoming increasingly rare. 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

The disappearance of a species is always a plural event, because it involves the unravelling of an interconnected world 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. 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.

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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. 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. 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 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.

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.

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.’

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.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 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. 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’. 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-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.