The Railwayman's Wife: A Novel

by Ashley Hay Narrated by Fiona Hardingham, Steve West

Overview

For fans of The Light Between Oceans, this “exquisitely written, true book of wonders” (Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author) explores the aftermath of World War II in an Australian seaside town, and the mysterious poem that changes the lives of those who encounter it.

In 1948, in a town overlooking the vast, blue ocean, Anikka Lachlan has all she ever wanted-until a random act transforms her into another postwar widow, destined to raise her daughter on her own. Awash in grief, she looks for answers in the pages of her favorite books and tries to learn the most difficult lesson of all: how to go on living.

A local poet, Roy McKinnon, experiences a different type of loss. How could his most powerful work come out of the brutal chaos of war, and why is he now struggling to regain his words and his purpose in peacetime? His childhood friend Dr. Frank Draper also seeks to reclaim his pre-war life but is haunted by his failure to help those who needed him most-the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps.

Then one day, on the mantle of her sitting room, Ani finds a poem. She knows neither where it came from, nor who its author is. But she has her suspicions. An unexpected and poignant love triangle emerges, between Ani, the poem, and the poet-whoever he may be.

Written in clear, shining prose, The Railwayman's Wife explores the power of beginnings and endings-and how difficult it can be to tell them apart. It is an exploration of life, loss, tragedy, and joy, of connection and separation, longing and acceptance, and an unadulterated celebration of love that “will have you feeling every emotion at once” (Bustle).

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2016 - AudioFile

Set in 1948, in Australia, this story weaves the lives of Annika, Mac, Iris, Roy, and Frank into a tale of love, loss, and grief. Narrator Fiona Hardingham tells Annika’s story as she navigates postwar widowhood, which plunges her into life as a single parent and newly hired librarian. Hardingham is superb at bringing the characters in Annika’s story to life with unique voices, allowing the listener to know and care about the grief and wounds that Iris, Roy, and Frank carry in the aftermath of war. In alternating chapters, narrator Steve West portrays the Scottish Mac, who is full of life, humor, and love for Annika, his wife, and Isabel, his daughter. The language is beautifully poetic and descriptive, and the narrators’ deliveries complement the author’s strengths. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

The Missourian

This novel has characters that become real to readers; you understand their grief, and the challenges they face. The Railwayman’s Wife is a story of endings and of beginnings.

Star Tribune

"[Hay's] prose style is simple yet vivid, and her insights on bereavement and moving forward are wise. Perhaps most impressive is her portrayal of the human predicament, the notion that one's heartfelt hopes are sometimes crushed against the rocks of reality."

Coastal Living

"Hay delicately threads together the lives of a widowed librarian, an unproductive poet, and a guilt-ridden doctor as they grapple with life after loss in post-World War II Thirroul, a small seaside village in New South Wales, Australia."

Historical Novel Society

"This story is a study in emotion: grief, hope, love, redemption, and yearning. The prose is so elegant that it seems to glide.

BookPage

The Railwayman’s Wife uses beautiful prose and empathetic characters to tell a story of both hope and heartache.

Shelf Awareness

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.

Sydney Morning Herald

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.

The Australian

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…. 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."

Psychology Today

A literary and literate gem of a book that leaves you with a set of emotions that I suspect last for a long, long time.

RT Magazine

Hay has lovingly crafted a poignant, character-driven novel filled with heartache and hope, which is transferred to the reader through lyrical prose, poetic dialogue and stunning imagery.

Bustle

After wow-ing European audiences, this book is coming stateside to dazzle you…Beautifully written, and featuring some excellent passages about writing and reading itself, this book will have you feeling every emotion at once.

Booklist

Hay’s poetic gifts are evident in her descriptions of the wild coastal landscape and Roy’s measured verse. This poignant, elegant novel delves into the depth of tragedy, the shaky ground of recovery, and the bittersweet memories of lost love.

Us Weekly

Ashley Hay weaves a moving tale of love, loss and hope.

Fiona McFarlane

“The Railwayman's Wife is a beautifully attentive study of what comes after - after a funeral, after a war - and Ashley Hay is a wise and gracious guide through this fascinating territory. This is a book in which grief and love are so entwined they make a new and wonderful kind of sense.

M.L. Stedman

The Railwayman’s Wife is a fine evocation of place and time - a vivid love letter to a particular corner of post-war Australia. Ashley Hay writes with subtle insight about grief and loss and the heart's voyage through and beyond them. It's a lovely, absorbing, and uplifting read.

Geraldine Brooks

Exquisitely written and deeply felt, The Railwayman's Wife is limpid and deep as the rock pools on the coastline beloved by this book’s characters and just as teeming with vibrant life. Ashley Hay’s novel of love and pain is a true book of wonders.

JUNE 2016 - AudioFile

Set in 1948, in Australia, this story weaves the lives of Annika, Mac, Iris, Roy, and Frank into a tale of love, loss, and grief. Narrator Fiona Hardingham tells Annika’s story as she navigates postwar widowhood, which plunges her into life as a single parent and newly hired librarian. Hardingham is superb at bringing the characters in Annika’s story to life with unique voices, allowing the listener to know and care about the grief and wounds that Iris, Roy, and Frank carry in the aftermath of war. In alternating chapters, narrator Steve West portrays the Scottish Mac, who is full of life, humor, and love for Annika, his wife, and Isabel, his daughter. The language is beautifully poetic and descriptive, and the narrators’ deliveries complement the author’s strengths. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2016-01-18
A year in the lives of Anikka "Ani" Lachlan, a young widow, and Roy McKinnon, a poet back from the World War II battlefield, provides a bittersweet tale of adjustment to life's tragedies. Hay's lovely language and imagery overlay grim content. Death is death, but does it matter how one died...or why? How do you go on after a loss? And why should you? Ani struggles to gain a foothold as her idyllic life on Australia's rugged coast is tragically altered after her railway-man husband's death in an accident. Inherent optimism, love for her child, and the community's support—and perhaps thoughts of her new friend Roy—provide her strength. Roy fights emotional battle scars and finds himself unable to write the profound poems he wrote during the war. He looks to Ani for his healing, and she becomes both his muse and secret love. His breakthrough poem is about Ani, and as he waits for her to acknowledge it, never daring to ask what she thought of it, his despondency grows. Ultimately Ani and Roy find their own ways into a new peace. Hay shifts between past and present to gradually pull together the fullness of her subject: life's randomness—why, for example, one person dies while another "keeps walking clear." The narrative flows slowly to its unsettling conclusion. Hay is both cerebral and emotional in portraying life's catastrophes and the way people cope. As if her message is too raw to lay out in blazing color, she camouflages it in poetry and half-seen images—and it works. The message is clear, and the shocks are softened but no less there. 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170537518
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/05/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Railwayman’s Wife

SHE SITS, her legs folded beneath her. The fingers of one hand trace the upholstery’s pattern while the other hand holds the pages of the book.

It could be any day, any year: call it 1935, 1938, 1945, or somewhere decades away in her future. Perhaps it’s the day after her wedding, the day after her daughter’s birth, the last day of the war, the last day of her life. Whenever it is, Anikka Lachlan is reading, swallowed by the shapes and spaces made by rows of dark letters on pale paper. She wets one finger, not slowly, but absently, and moves it to turn the next page.

From outside, across the roofs of this small town, comes a sharp line of noise—a train’s brakes and the squeal of wheel on rail, metal on metal. Ani looks up from the page but at nothing, and at nowhere, as if the room she’s sitting in and the rest of this whole cacophonous world do not, at this moment, quite exist.

The sound fades. The silence holds. She looks down, and finds the next word.

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