For fans 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. By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. 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. 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.

This is a book about falling in love with vanishing thingsLate 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. Told through the stories of four ‘uncharismatic’ creatures – eels, moths, freshwater pearl mussels, crickets – and Michael’s forays into their dwindling worlds, his is an inventive and curious account of modern extinction.

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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.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. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. 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. I know when I first came to England, I was stunned by the deep green of the hills, the bluebells, the daffodils coming out so early… but have forgotten to marvel at all of this now, after living here so long.

Michael captures how it feels to find pockets of magic and meaning on our doorsteps, and how to sustain our hope for the future. Patterns on moths remind him of his grandmother’s sarongs and lists of cave paintings include Lascaux, Altamira and Sulawesi: by dint of his heritage, Malay makes his book seamlessly inclusive and with an expansive world view.

That’s a fascinating set of parallels he seems to draw, and I do love the idea of focusing on creatures often neglected (Blyton in Adventures of Pip chose to highlight smaller animals and insects which I loved too). 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. Most nature books claim to make the world feel bigger and more precious, but Late Light really does. His voice is fresh, passionate, and beautifully attuned to the layers of enchantment and melancholy that emerge from the living world in today's challenging times.