The aftermath of loss: Ashley Hay's The Railwayman's Wife

Ashley Hay’s The Railwayman’s Wife is a novel tailor-made for librarians and book lovers (like me) who enjoy literary fiction. Set in the Australian seaside town of Thirroul beginning in 1948, it navigates the emotional changes in a young woman, Anikka Lachlan, over the course of her first year as a widow.

UK & Australian cover

After her Scottish-born husband, Mac, dies in a railway accident, it’s suggested that Ani replace the librarian in Thirroul’s Railway Institute Library after her retirement. Ani has always loved to read – Jane Eyre is her favorite novel – and although her new work schedule disrupts her routine with her 10-year-old daughter, Isabel, she finds comfort in helping her fellow townspeople find the right books.

During this painful time, she develops friendships with some of her neighbors, including Roy McKinnon, who fears that his gift for poetry deserted him in peacetime, and Frank Draper, a doctor who can’t escape his past failure to prevent the deaths of recently liberated concentration camp victims. Ani is taken aback by Frank’s occasional brusqueness but comes to realize where it comes from.

This is a bittersweet, introspective novel that follows people’s search for hope and understanding even in the most trying circumstances. It evokes Ani’s feelings not only of loss also but of frustration at life’s unfairness, since she and Mac had come through years of war unscathed only for him to die tragically young anyway. It’s also understandably strange for her to spend her days surrounded by the sound of trains, one of which killed her husband.

US cover

Ani holds onto her memories of Mac, reflecting on the fact that they’ll have no more conversations with one another: “It still throws her to realize she’ll learn nothing more directly from her husband, only secondhand anecdotes about him. And such things can never be hers to claim.” Through others’ stories, Ani discovers a side to Mac she probably wouldn’t have ever known otherwise.

Chapters about their married life, but seen from Mac’s viewpoint, add to the story’s poignancy and originality. Through these sections – which feel shocking when first encountered, because one doesn’t expect to reach the minds of the dead – we learn how much Mac strived to make himself feel worthy of her.

The Railwayman’s Wife is too deep and multilayered of a book to offer simple answers, but eloquently describes how people seek their own paths out of bereavement and loss.

This was a personal purchase; I’d bought the UK edition (Allen & Unwin, 2014) back when it came out, before I heard that a US edition would be published (Atria/Simon & Schuster, April 2016, $26). This is my second entry in the 2016 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

For background on the story, see Ashley Hay's essay in Library Journal: Reading the Rails: How Australia's Historic Railway Libraries Inspired a Novel.