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 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. 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 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.

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? The river Avon meanders towards Bristol’s characteristic skyline: Cabot Tower, Wills Memorial Hall and the University’s physics department, which looks like it belongs in a fairy tale. To the West I could see the Mendip Hills, dotted with trees that looked like perfect lollipops.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

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. 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. It achieves this with thoughtful description of experience rather than big rhapsodising monologues. It really captures something about the way our focus and experience of the world shifts, dilates and contracts in the moment as we move through it and encounter it. 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. A book of little revelations, Michael Malay’s ‘Late Light’ will leave you aching with world-love, writes Abi Andrews. 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.

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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. 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

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. His voice is irresistible – Late Light is a powerful new work of nature writing. ‘– Sara Baume, Seven Steeples The disappearance of a species is always a plural event, because it involves the unravelling of an interconnected world 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! 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. 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… 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’.