Romy Ash: Mantle - Brisbane Square Library

About the book

Nature has another evolution in store for us.

I think about how the earth likes to cough things up. Bones, fossils, slivers of rock, like an interior self. How it likes to spew gas, lava, smoke. How the earth under our feet is anything but solid. How in fact, the surface itself is constantly in movement, teeming. And inside, inside, in the mantle, we can only guess.

Ursula is a self-possessed geologist. In her life on the mainland, she’s a guardian of the timescale, dividing history into segments and reading the Earth’s depths. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s simply science.

When her ailing mother is struck with a mystery illness she is called to the coastline of lutruwita/Tasmania. What begins as an incurable rash evolves into something more dangerous.

With the sickness spreading across the island, and beyond, Ursula finds herself stranded, stuck in her mother’s house and increasingly entangled with a younger man who she met at the pub. She is grieving, beginning to unhinge – and now she too has the rash.

The wild places of the island are solace, even as the world around her begins to shift. As she faces this eruption of new life, and grapples with death and decay, Ursula realises that this change may not signal an end, but a beginning.

Deeply moving and utterly original, Mantle is a powerful novel that shows us our fate is intertwined with the people around us, and the fate of our world.

About the author

Romy Ash is the author of Floundering, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, Commonwealth Book Prize and Prime Minister’s Literary Awards; and a children’s picture book called As Bright as a Rainbow. She was named one of Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists of the Year in 2013. Her work has been published in the Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Best Australian Short Stories, Best Australian Essays, among others. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne with her family.

About the in conversation host

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country - winner of the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award, The Victorian Prize for Literature, the ABIA Small Publishers Adult Book of the Year and co-winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The French translation, Les animaux de ce pays, won the 2025 Prix Gargantua. Laura Jean is also the author of Holiday in Cambodia, and her latest collection is Gunflower. She was the 2025 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow to Cork, Ireland, and teaches Creative Writing at Massey University.

Books will be available for purchase, or bring your copy from home to be signed. Presented as part of the Lord Mayor’s Writers in Residence series.

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Host or Publisher Brisbane City Council