The Railwayman’s Wife
TwoRoads, UK, November 2017
HarperCollins, The Netherlands, October 2017
Mercure de France, France, April 2017
Sperling, Italy, February 2017
Atria, US, April 2016, and in paperback through Washington Square Press, US, January 2017
Allen & Unwin UK, January 2014
Allen & Unwin, Australia, April 2013
In a small town on the land’s edge, in the strange space at a war’s end, a widow, a poet and a doctor each try to find their own peace, and their own new story.
In Thirroul, in 1948, people chase their dreams through the books in the railway’s library. Anikka Lachlan searches for solace after her life is destroyed by a single random act. Roy McKinnon, who found poetry in the mess of war, has lost his words and his hope. Frank Draper is trapped by the guilt of those his treatment and care failed on their first day of freedom. All three struggle with the same question: how now to be alive.
Written in clear, shining prose and with an eloquent understanding of the human heart, The Railwayman’s Wife explores the power of beginnings and endings, and how hard it can sometimes be to tell them apart. It’s a story of life, loss, and what comes after; of connection and separation, longing and acceptance. 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.
It’s a story that will break your heart with hope.
• Winner, the Colin Roderick Prize, 2014, awarded by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies
• Winner, People’s Choice Award, 2014 NSW Premier’s Prize
• Shortlisted for the Christina Stead Award, 2014 NSW Premier’s Prize
• Longlisted for the 2014 Miles Franklin Award
• Longlisted for the 2014 Nita B. Kibble Award
The Railwayman's Wife was released in the US on April 5, 2016. It's been spotted in bookshops from Fifth Avenue all the way to Hawaii, and below are links to some of the coverage it sparked in that part of the world. It has also appeared in French, Dutch and Italian – links to these editions are given above. And in late 2017, a new edition was published in the UK by TwoRoads.
· Library Journal. Print feature/ Author essay. “How Australia’s historic railway libraries inspired a novel.” April 1, 2016
Read it here
· ReadItForward.com. Author post. “14 Fictional Libraries to Check Out” April 8, 2016
http://www.readitforward.com/bookshelf/14-fictional-libraries-to-check-out/
· MyBookishlife.com. Blog mention. “NEW FICTION APRIL 2016.” April 3, 2016
http://www.mybookishlife.com/new-fiction-april-2016/
· Bookish.com. Author Post. “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Superpowers of Reading (and Writing) Fiction.” April 7, 2016
https://www.bookish.com/articles/six-impossible-things-before-breakfast-the-superpowers-of-reading-and-writing-fiction/
· BookPage. Online review. “The Railwayman’s Wife uses beautiful prose and empathetic characters to tell a story of both hope and heartache.” April 5, 2016
https://bookpage.com/reviews/19673-ashley-hay-railwaymans-wife#.VwfKUZwrLq4
· Shelf Awareness. Review. “This thoughtful, elegant portrait of lives turned inside out and finding the way forward from despair is sure to find a place in the hearts of its audience.” April 2016
http://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=494#m8643
· Silver’s Reviews. Blog review. “Ms. Hay definitely gives us a glimpse into the beauty of New South Wales and the hearts and desires of the characters.” April 5, 2016
http://silversolara.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-railwaymans-wife-by-ashley-hay.html
· Woman Around Town. Online review. “It’s said that the joy of literature isn’t in the endings (be they happy or sad), but in the journey and that’s definitely the case here. Ashley Hay writes with a beauty and lyricism that’s simply breathtaking to experience.” April 5, 2016
http://www.womanaroundtown.com/sections/reading-around/the-railwaymans-wife-books-provide-a-refuge-from-pain#sthash.P2GVhTJR.dpuf
‘Ashley Hay’s beautiful romance of grief and love set in the escarpment landscape that once enchanted D.H. Lawrence will come to speak for the south coast in the same way that Delia Falconer’s The Service of Clouds speaks for the Blue Mountains. Everything about this novel – sudden loss, unexpected love, misdirected hope and desire, as well as the mysterious power of the written word and the candescence of the coastal landscape itself – is expressed with a profound understanding of every nuance of emotion. An extended meditation on “the limitless surprise of being here”, to quote from the poem that is central to the story, The Railwayman’s Wife illuminates the deepest places of the human heart.’ – Debra Adelaide, author of Letter to George Clooney
‘Indeed, in this poignant rumination on life, death, memory, dreaming, and the anxious spaces in between, it’s hard to find fault with a single one of Hay’s words, which speak to and provoke our deepest desires for literature to transform and heal us … Hay makes us acutely aware of our place as readers, appealing to our need to believe in and empathise with others, both real and imagined, while reminding us of our terrible powerlessness to alter history, no matter how much we may long for alternate endings. As Ani, Frank and Roy try to make peace with the edges of their stories, Hay throws the healing power of words to the wind. Ultimately, we are left to find within its beginnings and endings our own sense of meaning, acceptance and hope, and to lose ourselves within its tender melancholic beauty.’ – Meredith Lewin, The Sunday Age
‘ … a heart-crunching novel about reading and writing, dreaming and hoping, loving and taking flight. It’s been a while since I felt so deeply affected by a novel and I will be very surprised if this book is not an award winner.’ – Paula Grunseit, Australian Bookseller and Publisher
‘This gentle and contemplative book is more like an extended poem than a novel. It’s an elegiac story to be read quietly for its exploration of loss and hearts seeking consolation.’ – Good Reading
‘Hay is a gifted and insightful writer; her prose is elegant and she has an eye for the telling detail. Most important, she understands people and the secret battles her characters face.’ – Adelaide Advertiser
‘Hay’s prose possesses a simple grace: stories and ideas matter to her, but so too do style and mood … In The Railwayman’s Wife, the essence of loss is elusive, and the detritus of grief not easily swept aside.’ – Australian Book Review
‘ … a melancholy love story, unfolding at its own steady pace, engrossing us in the lives and losses of its principals . . . Hay manages the emotional weather of the novel with equability, compassion and intelligence . . . another recent fictional return to the just-out-of-reach Australia of the 1930s and ’40s. Hay’s venture there is wishful, astringent and rewarding.’ – Peter Pierce, The Canberra Times
‘ … a beautifully rendered and psychologically acute picture of Ani Lachlan’s widowhood … Outwardly, there is no exorbitance to Ani’s grieving. Only the reader is privy to the chaos of her emotions, the perverse and magical thinking she privately indulges … Hay handles the delicate progress of Ani’s return to the world with sympathy and toughness; she is an author in whom intellectual scope and empathetic imagination are not separate activities but two sides of the same coin. If her first novel, The Body in the Clouds, was a book in which ideas were predominant, this work is unashamedly concerned with the movements of the heart. Finally, though, Thirroul itself emerges as a central presence in the novel … we know D.H. Lawrence got in first … Yet it is fair to say Hay, who spent her childhood in the same town, brings her own poetry to bear. She makes of it a coastal sublime, meticulously described. But she also makes that liminal strip into a metaphor – at once vaporously melancholy yet profoundly ordinary – in a manner that recalls the sour-sweet best of Michael Ondaatje’s fiction. Another author, Ford Madox Ford, began his The Good Soldier by claiming, “This is the saddest story.” It isn’t. That title rightly belongs to The Railwayman’s Wife.’ – Geordie Williamson, The Australian
‘One of the strange contradictions of fiction is that immense beauty can often be found in writing about grief and loss. The things we often choose to look away from or avoid in everyday life can, in the hands of a novelist like Ashley Hay, become rich terrain. The key to the novel is the notion that it is only through narrative that we can understand ourselves at a personal level and that, through this process, can we come to terms with the world. This is the uplifting message that surges through The Railwayman’s Wife and out of the experience of loss. It shows us that not all stories about grief are desolate, that somehow, in finding a way to travel through these difficult emotions, people are capable of great things. This sense of hope is conveyed in one of the novel’s concluding sentences, aptly reminiscent of Hemingway: “Somewhere in the world, the sun is always rising.”’ – Gretchen Schirm, Sydney Review of Books
'An extraordinary light falls on every page of this tender and gripping story. The lives of a widow and a war poet, mending and dreaming in a tiny coastal village, reveal movingly a wider world of catastrophe, violence and beauty.' – Belinda Castles, author of Hannah and Emil
TwoRoads, UK, November 2017
HarperCollins, The Netherlands, October 2017
Mercure de France, France, April 2017
Sperling, Italy, February 2017
Atria, US, April 2016, and in paperback through Washington Square Press, US, January 2017
Allen & Unwin UK, January 2014
Allen & Unwin, Australia, April 2013
In a small town on the land’s edge, in the strange space at a war’s end, a widow, a poet and a doctor each try to find their own peace, and their own new story.
In Thirroul, in 1948, people chase their dreams through the books in the railway’s library. Anikka Lachlan searches for solace after her life is destroyed by a single random act. Roy McKinnon, who found poetry in the mess of war, has lost his words and his hope. Frank Draper is trapped by the guilt of those his treatment and care failed on their first day of freedom. All three struggle with the same question: how now to be alive.
Written in clear, shining prose and with an eloquent understanding of the human heart, The Railwayman’s Wife explores the power of beginnings and endings, and how hard it can sometimes be to tell them apart. It’s a story of life, loss, and what comes after; of connection and separation, longing and acceptance. 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.
It’s a story that will break your heart with hope.
• Winner, the Colin Roderick Prize, 2014, awarded by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies
• Winner, People’s Choice Award, 2014 NSW Premier’s Prize
• Shortlisted for the Christina Stead Award, 2014 NSW Premier’s Prize
• Longlisted for the 2014 Miles Franklin Award
• Longlisted for the 2014 Nita B. Kibble Award
The Railwayman's Wife was released in the US on April 5, 2016. It's been spotted in bookshops from Fifth Avenue all the way to Hawaii, and below are links to some of the coverage it sparked in that part of the world. It has also appeared in French, Dutch and Italian – links to these editions are given above. And in late 2017, a new edition was published in the UK by TwoRoads.
· Library Journal. Print feature/ Author essay. “How Australia’s historic railway libraries inspired a novel.” April 1, 2016
Read it here
· ReadItForward.com. Author post. “14 Fictional Libraries to Check Out” April 8, 2016
http://www.readitforward.com/bookshelf/14-fictional-libraries-to-check-out/
· MyBookishlife.com. Blog mention. “NEW FICTION APRIL 2016.” April 3, 2016
http://www.mybookishlife.com/new-fiction-april-2016/
· Bookish.com. Author Post. “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Superpowers of Reading (and Writing) Fiction.” April 7, 2016
https://www.bookish.com/articles/six-impossible-things-before-breakfast-the-superpowers-of-reading-and-writing-fiction/
· BookPage. Online review. “The Railwayman’s Wife uses beautiful prose and empathetic characters to tell a story of both hope and heartache.” April 5, 2016
https://bookpage.com/reviews/19673-ashley-hay-railwaymans-wife#.VwfKUZwrLq4
· Shelf Awareness. Review. “This thoughtful, elegant portrait of lives turned inside out and finding the way forward from despair is sure to find a place in the hearts of its audience.” April 2016
http://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers-issue.html?issue=494#m8643
· Silver’s Reviews. Blog review. “Ms. Hay definitely gives us a glimpse into the beauty of New South Wales and the hearts and desires of the characters.” April 5, 2016
http://silversolara.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-railwaymans-wife-by-ashley-hay.html
· Woman Around Town. Online review. “It’s said that the joy of literature isn’t in the endings (be they happy or sad), but in the journey and that’s definitely the case here. Ashley Hay writes with a beauty and lyricism that’s simply breathtaking to experience.” April 5, 2016
http://www.womanaroundtown.com/sections/reading-around/the-railwaymans-wife-books-provide-a-refuge-from-pain#sthash.P2GVhTJR.dpuf
‘Ashley Hay’s beautiful romance of grief and love set in the escarpment landscape that once enchanted D.H. Lawrence will come to speak for the south coast in the same way that Delia Falconer’s The Service of Clouds speaks for the Blue Mountains. Everything about this novel – sudden loss, unexpected love, misdirected hope and desire, as well as the mysterious power of the written word and the candescence of the coastal landscape itself – is expressed with a profound understanding of every nuance of emotion. An extended meditation on “the limitless surprise of being here”, to quote from the poem that is central to the story, The Railwayman’s Wife illuminates the deepest places of the human heart.’ – Debra Adelaide, author of Letter to George Clooney
‘Indeed, in this poignant rumination on life, death, memory, dreaming, and the anxious spaces in between, it’s hard to find fault with a single one of Hay’s words, which speak to and provoke our deepest desires for literature to transform and heal us … Hay makes us acutely aware of our place as readers, appealing to our need to believe in and empathise with others, both real and imagined, while reminding us of our terrible powerlessness to alter history, no matter how much we may long for alternate endings. As Ani, Frank and Roy try to make peace with the edges of their stories, Hay throws the healing power of words to the wind. Ultimately, we are left to find within its beginnings and endings our own sense of meaning, acceptance and hope, and to lose ourselves within its tender melancholic beauty.’ – Meredith Lewin, The Sunday Age
‘ … a heart-crunching novel about reading and writing, dreaming and hoping, loving and taking flight. It’s been a while since I felt so deeply affected by a novel and I will be very surprised if this book is not an award winner.’ – Paula Grunseit, Australian Bookseller and Publisher
‘This gentle and contemplative book is more like an extended poem than a novel. It’s an elegiac story to be read quietly for its exploration of loss and hearts seeking consolation.’ – Good Reading
‘Hay is a gifted and insightful writer; her prose is elegant and she has an eye for the telling detail. Most important, she understands people and the secret battles her characters face.’ – Adelaide Advertiser
‘Hay’s prose possesses a simple grace: stories and ideas matter to her, but so too do style and mood … In The Railwayman’s Wife, the essence of loss is elusive, and the detritus of grief not easily swept aside.’ – Australian Book Review
‘ … a melancholy love story, unfolding at its own steady pace, engrossing us in the lives and losses of its principals . . . Hay manages the emotional weather of the novel with equability, compassion and intelligence . . . another recent fictional return to the just-out-of-reach Australia of the 1930s and ’40s. Hay’s venture there is wishful, astringent and rewarding.’ – Peter Pierce, The Canberra Times
‘ … a beautifully rendered and psychologically acute picture of Ani Lachlan’s widowhood … Outwardly, there is no exorbitance to Ani’s grieving. Only the reader is privy to the chaos of her emotions, the perverse and magical thinking she privately indulges … Hay handles the delicate progress of Ani’s return to the world with sympathy and toughness; she is an author in whom intellectual scope and empathetic imagination are not separate activities but two sides of the same coin. If her first novel, The Body in the Clouds, was a book in which ideas were predominant, this work is unashamedly concerned with the movements of the heart. Finally, though, Thirroul itself emerges as a central presence in the novel … we know D.H. Lawrence got in first … Yet it is fair to say Hay, who spent her childhood in the same town, brings her own poetry to bear. She makes of it a coastal sublime, meticulously described. But she also makes that liminal strip into a metaphor – at once vaporously melancholy yet profoundly ordinary – in a manner that recalls the sour-sweet best of Michael Ondaatje’s fiction. Another author, Ford Madox Ford, began his The Good Soldier by claiming, “This is the saddest story.” It isn’t. That title rightly belongs to The Railwayman’s Wife.’ – Geordie Williamson, The Australian
‘One of the strange contradictions of fiction is that immense beauty can often be found in writing about grief and loss. The things we often choose to look away from or avoid in everyday life can, in the hands of a novelist like Ashley Hay, become rich terrain. The key to the novel is the notion that it is only through narrative that we can understand ourselves at a personal level and that, through this process, can we come to terms with the world. This is the uplifting message that surges through The Railwayman’s Wife and out of the experience of loss. It shows us that not all stories about grief are desolate, that somehow, in finding a way to travel through these difficult emotions, people are capable of great things. This sense of hope is conveyed in one of the novel’s concluding sentences, aptly reminiscent of Hemingway: “Somewhere in the world, the sun is always rising.”’ – Gretchen Schirm, Sydney Review of Books
'An extraordinary light falls on every page of this tender and gripping story. The lives of a widow and a war poet, mending and dreaming in a tiny coastal village, reveal movingly a wider world of catastrophe, violence and beauty.' – Belinda Castles, author of Hannah and Emil