The Railwayman's Wife - Softcover

An elegiac tale of love, loss and letting go, The Railwayman's Wife shimmers with grace. * The Newtown Review of Books * Wishful, astringent and rewarding * Sydney Morning Herald * [Hay's writing] 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. * The Australian * Beautifully rendered and psychologically acute... [Hay] is an author in whom intellectual scope and empathetic imagination are not separate activities but two sides of the same coin. * Weekend Australian * 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 * Her characters are illuminated by an incandescent intelligence and rare sensibility. * Australian Book Review * 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. * The Age *

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. On the south coast of New South Wales, 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 be sometimes 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.