Interviews & Reviews
The Railwayman’s Wife
Click here for a Bookshots interview with Caroline Baum
Click here for an interview with The Australian Writers' Centre about writing The Railwayman's Wife
Click here for an interview with Kate Evans on Radio National's Books Plus
Click here for the review that appeared in the Sunday Age, Sun-Herald and Canberra Times
Click here for the review from The Australian
Click here for the review in the Sydney Review of Books
Click here for Australian Bookseller & Publisher review
Click here for an interview with Culture Street
Click here for an interview with Phil Brown in the Courier-Mail
“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 The Household Guide to Dying
“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
The Body in the Clouds
'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
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
Herbarium
'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.