Interviews & Reviews
The Body in the Clouds - reviews
'With The Body in the Clouds, [Hay] makes a triumphant entry into fiction. Opening in 1930 with the plunge of a workman named Roy Kelly from the half-finished Sydney Harbour Bridge into the water below (he’s the only person to have survived the fall), the novel braids together stories of three men who witness the dive (or something like it) at different moments in time, all from the same vantage at Dawes Point.
'This startling conceit is sustained throughout a novel which ranges in time from the 1700s to the early Aughts, and from our first astronomer William Dawes to an expatriate financial worker returning to Sydney after years abroad. It is a gorgeous, Faberge egg of a book, enamelled with literary resonances and rhyming symbols, which we will still be reading decades from now.’
– The Weekend Australian
'[A] scintillating and accomplished debut novel … Ashley Hay’s structures and her characters are illuminated by an incandescent intelligence and a rare sensibility. A commanding debut novel indeed.' – The Australian Book Review
'Daring and original, brilliantly executed … The novel The Body in the Clouds forcibly, if curiously, recalls is Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days. Both the American’s fiction and Hay’s are at once intensely disquieting yet brought to harmonious resolution. No matter what they describe, the writing in each case is imbued with an eloquent calm.'
– The Canberra Times
'Richly imaginative, but also dauntingly complex[,] Hay tells three separate stories, and slowly converges them … What the great American poet Hart Crane did for Brooklyn Bridge, Ashley Hay has done for this one.'
– The Australian
'[Her] turn to fiction writing, away from nonfiction, provides an opportunity for her to give readers what her characters long for: not just relics but whole moments and lived passages from the past, filled out and felt. Her novel acts as a bulwark against the contemporary loss of willingness to see and seek out the extraordinary in the ordinary world.'
– The Sydney Morning Herald
'She illuminates the connections and the manner in which we choose and create stories to meet our own needs. It's a pleasure to read: superbly written and imaginatively conceived.'
– Adelaide Advertiser
Australian Bookseller & Publisher review
Museum
'It will whet its readers' appetites, leaving them eager to know more about the culture of natural history that shaped the Macleays and their collections.'
– Times Literary Supplement
‘In an exquisite introductory essay, Ashley Hay tells how Alexander [Macleay]'s son William and nephew William John succumbed to the same mania, piling up butterflies and beetles, bats, gnats and bandicoots, corals and sea lilies, cuscuses and birds of paradise (William John led and paid for the colony's first scientific expedition to New Guinea), and a skull long thought to belong to a (mythical) bunyip; it was actually a deformed foal's.’
– Time magazine
When Books Die
The Australian review
Herbarium
The Telegraph (London) review
'Based around the National Herbarium of New South Wales, this is a fascinating and pictorially stunning history of its creation and present day status. … With an informative, easy-to-read and endlessly fascinating essay on the subject by Ashley Hay, as well as the stunning photographic portraits, this is a book for all spectrums of reader - gardener, historian, adventure-lovers, botanist and museum-lovers.'
-The Book Place
Gum
The New York Review of Books review
The Secret
‘Part Gothic thriller, part comedy of manners, postmodernly mindful of biographic limitations, Hay's is an engrossing story of the past told in the language of the present’
– The Australian
‘Beautifully written … a gripping read as compulsive as any novel’
– Daily Mail, London
You can read an interview with Ashley about The Secret at the Duffy & Snellgrove website.