Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published in USA
Apr 2016
288 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
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.
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.
"Multilayered, graceful, couched in poetry, supremely honest, gentle yet jarring, Hay's thought-provoking novel pulls you along slowly, like a deep river that is deceptively calm but full of hidden rapids. Much to ponder." - Kirkus
"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." - The Australian
"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." - Sydney Morning Herald
"An absorbing and uplifting read." - M.L. Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans
"Exquisitely written and deeply felt
a true book of wonders." Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Secret Chord
"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
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ashley Hay is the internationally acclaimed author of four nonfiction books, including The Secret: The Strange Marriage of Annabella Milbanke and Lord Byron, and the novels The Body in the Clouds and The Railwayman's Wife, which was honored with the Colin Roderick Award by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the most prestigious literary prize in Australia, among numerous other accolades. Ashley is on the web at www.ashleyhay.com.au.
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