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

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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. 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”. 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. One of the things that I found most engaging about this book is the way it sometimes perfectly captures that sense of the sublime that an encounter with the natural world can provoke, and that brief sensation of the boundaries of the self and the world bleeding into one another.

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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.

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 brings the refreshing perspective of someone who goes from seeing England as a foreign place to someone who deeply studies its secret wonders. 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! 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.