Ashley Hay

From the acclaimed author of the “exquisitely written and deeply felt” (Geraldine Brooks, author of The Secret Chord) novel The Railwayman’s Wife comes a magical and gorgeously wrought tale of an astonishing event that connects three people across three hundred years. Imagine you looked up at just the right moment and saw something completely unexpected. What if it was something so marvelous that it transformed time and space forever? The Body in the Clouds tells the story of one such extraordinary moment—a man falling from the sky, and surviving—and of the three men who see it, in different ways and at different times, as they stand on the same piece of land. An astronomer in the 1700s, a bridge worker in the 1930s, and an expatriate banker returning home in the early twenty-first century: all three are transformed by this one magical event. And all three are struggling to understand what the meaning of “home” is, and how to recognize it once you’re there. Widely praised for her “poetic gifts” (Booklist) and “graceful, supremely honest, [and] thought-provoking” (Kirkus Reviews) prose, Ashley Hay has crafted a luminous and unforgettable novel about the power of story, its ability to define the world around us, and the questions that transcend time.

A Novel

The Body in the Clouds

Through the richly intertwined narratives of two women from different generations, Ashley Hay, known for her “elegant prose, which draws warm and textured portraits as it celebrates the web of human stories” (New York Times Book Review) weaves an intricate, bighearted tale of the many small decisions—the invisible moments—that come to make a life. “Readers who loved the quiet introspection of Anita Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge will enjoy the detailed emotional journeys of Hay’s characters. Their stories will linger long after the final page is turned” (Library Journal). When Elsie Gormley falls and is forced to leave her Brisbane home of sixty-two years, Lucy Kiss and her family move in, eager to make the house their own. Still, Lucy can’t help but feel that she’s unwittingly stumbled into an entirely new life—new house, new city, new baby—and she struggles to navigate the journey from adventurous lover to young parent. In her nearby nursing facility, Elsie traces the years she spent in her beloved house, where she too transformed from a naïve newlywed into a wife and mother, and eventually, a widow. Gradually, the boundary between present and past becomes more porous for her, and for Lucy—because the house has secrets of its own, and its rooms seem to share with Lucy memories from Elsie’s life. Luminous and deeply affecting, A Hundred Small Lessons is a “lyrically written portrayal” (BookPage, Top Pick) of what it means to be human, and how a place can transform who we are. It’s about a house that becomes much more than a home, and the shifting identities of mother and daughter; father and son. Above all else, this is a story of the surprising and miraculous ways that our lives intersect with those who have come before us, and those who follow.

A Hundred Small Lessons

""An absorbing and uplifting read."--M.L. Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans "This is a book in which grief and love are so entwined they make a new and wonderful kind of sense."--Fiona McFarlane, author of The Night Guest Amidst the strange, silent aftermath of World War II, a widow, a poet, and a doctor search for lasting peace and fresh beginnings in this internationally acclaimed, award-winning novel. When Anikka Lachlan's husband, Mac, is killed in a railway accident, she is offered--and accepts--a job at the Railway Institute's library and searches there for some solace in her unexpectedly new life. But in Thirroul, in 1948, she's not the only person trying to chase dreams through books. There's Roy McKinnon, who found poetry in the mess of war, but who has now lost his words and his hope. There's Frank Draper, trapped by the guilt of those his medical treatment and care failed on their first day of freedom. All three struggle to find their own peace, and their own new story. But along with the firming of this triangle of friendship and a sense of lives inching towards renewal come other extremities--and misunderstandings. In the end, love and freedom can have unexpected ways of expressing themselves. The Railwayman's Wife explores the power of beginnings and endings, and how hard it can sometimes be to tell them apart. Most of all, it celebrates love in all its forms, and the beauty of discovering that loving someone can be as extraordinary as being loved yourself"--

a novel

The railwayman's wife

Three people, struggling to come to terms with great loss after the end of the war, search for peace in a small town's library in a heartbreaking novel of love and loss and the healing power of memory and words.

The Railwayman's Wife

No matter where you look in Australia, you’re more than likely to see a eucalyptus tree. Scrawny or majestic, smooth as pearl or rough as guts, they have defined a continent for millennia, and shaped the possibilities and imaginations of those who live among them. Australia’s First Nations have long knowledge of the characters and abilities of the eucalypts. And as part of the disruption wrought by colonial Australia, botanists battled in a race to count, classify and characterise these complex species in their own system – a battle that has now spanned more than two hundred years. Gum: The story of eucalypts & their champions tells the stories of that battle and of some of the other eucalyptographers – the explorers, poets, painters, foresters, conservationists, scientists, engine drivers and many more who have been obsessed by these trees and who have sought to champion their powers, explore their potential and describe their future states. Eucalypts have fuelled this country’s mighty fi res as readily as they’ve fuelled so many arguments about the ways they might be thought of – and yet they are as vulnerable as any other organism to the disruptions and threats of climate change. This new edition of Gum, from award-winning author Ashley Hay, is a powerful and lyrical exploration of these transformative and still transforming trees. It’s a story of unique landscapes, curious people, and very big ideas. Ashley Hay writes with heart, head, energy and passion. She understands the natural world as we must all experience it, with deep love and respect. To preserve Country and to save ourselves we must live with and in a treed world. They are our champions, just as Ashley Hay is for them. – Tony Birch, author of The White Girl and Dark as Last Night Gum is one of my favourite books, I return to it often. Ashley Hay’s curiosity ranges wide, her research skills run deep and she’s a beautiful writer, thinker and storyteller. To have all these skills brought to bear upon a tree as deserving, as iconic, as the eucalyptus: well, I’m in heaven. – Sophie Cunningham, author of City of Trees and Melbourne A classic of Australian environmental writing, Gum offers a startling new perspective on Australian history, suggesting powerful new ways of seeing the past and revealing the complex and often surprising ways trees shape both our physical and imaginary worlds. – James Bradley, author of Ghost Species and Clade Ashley Hay’s words fill you with the same kind of awe and wonder as a crushed gum leaf held to your nose: Gum is a heady, intoxicating and powerful exploration of the extraordinary history and relationships between people and the iconic eucalyptus. Since reading this book, the sight of gum trees has filled me with a new level of reverence and gratitude to know these sentient beings, and to know Ashley Hay’s writing. – Holly Ringland, author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and co-presenter of Back to Nature The book’s great strength comes from the unfolding sense of Australian national identity that somehow crystallizes around the eucalyptus tree. – Tim Flannery, The New York Review of Books (2002) Hay’s Gum is like a gum itself: it is made in equal parts of light and leaf; of music and matter … [It is] a sturdy, shapely book of fact, animated by wonder. – Mark Tredinnick, The Canberra Times (2002) Hay brings these peculiarly Australian trees to life, describing a slice of our colonial history in the process. – The Sydney Morning Herald (2002) As this beautifully written and evocative book makes clear, we are tied to the gum tree in ways we can’t even imagine. – Eureka Street (2002)

The story of eucalypts & their champions

When Elsie Gormley leaves the Brisbane house in which she has lived for more than sixty years, Lucy Kiss and her family move in, eager to establish their new life. As Lucy and her husband Ben navigate their transformation from adventurous lovers to new parents, they take comfort in memories of their vibrant past while unearthing their future selves. But the house has secrets of its own, and the rooms seem to share recollections of Elsie's life with Lucy. In her nearby nursing home, Elsie traces the span of her life: moments she can't bear to let go and places to which she dreams of returning. As the boundary between present and past becomes increasingly porous, two families' stories intersect in sudden and unexpected ways.

A lyrical novel of two mothers from different generations and how their lives converge in one hot, wet summer. From the bestselling author of The Railwayman's Wife.

Truth-telling in a post-truth world. Four years on from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, there's a clear divide between the groundswell of popular support to recognise the rightful place of First Nations people in Australia's democratic life and ongoing political inertia in the same space. Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning is a wide-ranging discussion of the multifaceted issues at play in Australia's fraught journey towards a full settlement with Indigenous peoples. What might be possible for Australia's narrative when reconciliation between the world's oldest continuing culture and one of its newest nation states is achieved? And how can this take place in an era of quick assumptions and divides, alternative facts and cancellations? Examining questions of history, truth-telling and decolonisation and revisiting colonial figures and assumptions and their ongoing legacies - in Australia and beyond -Acts of Reckoning reframes the past in order to form new futures, and celebrates how much work is already underway.

Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning

Robyn Stacey

This stunningly beautiful book throws open the closed doors of the Sydney herbaria, and the history of Australia's flora.

Herbarium

La biblioteca sull'oceano

Griffith Review 77: Real Cool World explores Antarctica as both a place and a canvas for imagination. This vast, dry continent drives much of our global weather, a litmus test for change at the world’s extremities and a canary in the coalmine. Stories about this deep south illuminate much of the rest of the planet’s past and future, and they also create a space to play out human ideas of exploration, investigation, and fantasy; ideas of other places, differently managed, often unattainable – particularly with the recent pause in global tourism. Is this an isolated arena for collaboration and cooperation – or a landscape where harsher realities are always navigated and often realised? Overarching this space, the Antarctic Treaty has weathered sixty years since its first signing, transforming from a baseline of scientific freedoms and territorial co-existence to encompass broad swathes of environmental protection and ever-changing delineations in the world’s atlas of political relationships. What do these treaties mean now – for Antarctica itself, and for global ideas of governance – as geopolitical alliances and desires shift and change, as the race for new sources of resources heats up, and as the results of a changing climate and exceeded tipping points come into play? Featuring powerful and beautiful narratives from the worlds of glaciology and marine biology to geopolitics, fiction and more, this collection explores science and stories from the planet’s southernmost continent.

Griffith Review 77: Real Cool World

"Painstakingly pieced together from their diaries and letters, The Secret is a sensitive and poignant portrait of the celebrity couple of their day, whose strange marriage became the talk of Regency England. And the story of the vulnerable Annabella, abandoned to her horrifying secret, has the compulsiveness of a novel."--BOOK JACKET.

The Strange Marriage of Annabella Milbanke and Lord Byron

The Secret

Coined by Sir Thomas More in the sixteenth century, the word 'utopia' is a play on the Greek for no place and good place. But is an ideal society unattainable -- or optimal? This edition of Griffith Review visits utopias old and new, near and far, to explore the possibilities and pitfalls of imagining a better future. From Plato's Republic to Samuel Butler's Erewhon, JG Ballard's High Rise and the failed countercultural dreams of the 1960s, utopian thinking has long influenced how we see the world. Where will it take us next? And do we even want to go there? What do our visions of utopia look like today? How can we disentangle the practical realities from the pipe dreams? What are the dangers of utopianism? How do questions of sustainability, gender equity and economic justice shape our visions of an ideal society, new politics, different ways of life? Can imagination save us in the end? Griffith Review 73: Hey, Utopia! asks you to consider other ways the world can be -- through essays, reportage, creative non-fiction, fiction, memoir, visual essays and poetry.

Griffith Review 73: Hey, Utopia!

Truth-telling in a post-truth world. Four years on from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, there’s a clear divide between the groundswell of popular support to recognise the rightful place of First Nations people in Australia’s democratic life and ongoing political inertia in the same space. Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning is a wide-ranging discussion of the multifaceted issues at play in Australia’s fraught journey towards a full settlement with Indigenous peoples. What might be possible for Australia’s narrative when reconciliation between the world’s oldest continuing culture and one of its newest nation states is achieved? And how can this take place in an era of quick assumptions and divides, alternative facts and cancellations? Examining questions of history, truth-telling and decolonisation and revisiting colonial figures and assumptions and their ongoing legacies – in Australia and beyond –Acts of Reckoning reframes the past in order to form new futures, and celebrates how much work is already underway.

Sometimes, we all need to get away... Griffith Review 74: Escape Routes plots the course of our daydreams, our transformations and our jailbreaks. It takes us across borders and through open and opening minds to places once out of reach. As restrictions lift and confines ease, it lights out for new territories, heading over the horizon to access other worlds. Where are we now, and where do we want to be tomorrow? And who do we want to be when we get there? As another testing year comes to an end, this edition celebrates what might come next. From mermaids and space matriarchs to fresh starts and flights of fancy, Escape Routes explores what it means to break out and break free. 'A literary degustation... The richness of these stories is amplified by the resonance between them.' -- Ed Wright, The Weekend Australian '(Griffith) Review doesn't shirk from the nuanced and doesn't seek refuge in simplistic notions or slogans. It remains Australia's primary literary review.' -- Professor Ken Smith, Dean and CEO ANZSOG 'I've loved what Griffith Review has put together...they're very human pieces, not hot takes. That's what GR has done so well...found a way past the veneer of things to their messy, bloody tendernesses.' -- Beejay Silcox, writer

Griffith Review 74: Escape Routes

Griffith Review 72: States of Mind respresents a collection of the mental, emotional and practical ways in which people have experienced and navigated their world during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Griffith Review 72: States of Mind

What can we learn about learning? Australians have one of the highest levels of educational attainment in the world, but not every Australian has access to a world-class education. What represents a 'good' education in a country with an increasingly segmented school system and a tertiary sector that faces profound uncertainties, both financial and existential? Griffith Review 75: Learning Curves explores the full spectrum of educational experiences -- from preschool to postgrad, from private to public, and from sandstone to the school of life. How has the global information age reshaped our knowledge institutions? What potential and possibilities lie in embracing Australia's vast repositories of First Nations' knowledge? Are traditional subjects -- arts, humanities, social sciences - still relevant in an increasingly contested field? And what do those engaged in the different aspects of learning - students, teachers, policymakers -- make of their experiences? Learning Curves navigates a range of life-long learning pathways, and explores the necessity of rupture and transformation along the way. Contributors include: Gabbie Stroud -- Tegan Bennett Daylight -- Lisa Fuller -- Bri Lee -- Erin Hortle -- Miriam Sved -- Gwilym Croucher -- Catherine Ball -- Pasi Sahlberg -- Cath Keenan -- Winnie Dunn -- Andrew Leigh 'Where the news cycle tends to feed cynicism, Griffith Review is the necessary counterpoint: a place of ideas and possibility. It's a relief to find the quality writing, reflection and observation nurtured in its pages.' -- Billy Griffiths, historian and writer

Griffith Review 75: Learning Curves

Un posto per i pensieri e per le parole è un posto speciale.

“Exquisite…a rich, meditative novel that explores the connectivity of people living in the same geographical space across the distance of time.” —New York Times Book Review From the acclaimed author of the “exquisitely written and deeply felt” (Geraldine Brooks, author of The Secret Chord) novel The Railwayman’s Wife comes a magical and gorgeously wrought tale of an astonishing event that connects three people across three hundred years. Imagine you looked up at just the right moment and saw something completely unexpected. What if it was something so marvelous that it transformed time and space forever? The Body in the Clouds tells the story of one such extraordinary moment—a man falling from the sky, and surviving—and of the three men who see it, in different ways and at different times, as they stand on the same piece of land. An astronomer in the 1700s, a bridge worker in the 1930s, and an expatriate banker returning home in the early twenty-first century: all three are transformed by this one magical event. And all three are struggling to understand what the meaning of “home” is, and how to recognize it once you’re there. Widely praised for her “poetic gifts” (Booklist) and “graceful, supremely honest, [and] thought-provoking” (Kirkus Reviews) prose, Ashley Hay has crafted a luminous and unforgettable novel about the power of story, its ability to define the world around us, and the questions that transcend time.

Ashley Hay

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