Romy Ash

and how it might be evolving into something.

Absolutely, I know.

I mean, I was in Melbourne in 2020, 2021, 22, so lived through that pandemic here when we didn't have very many freedoms.

And yeah, I wouldn't call this a pandemic novel because it becomes quite clear it's something very different.

But the idea of stepping into that worry is pretty real at the beginning of the book anyway.

Oh, it's so important.

And the specific field of geology that Ursula studies, she studies the strata of the Earth.

So these are the many layers of the Earth.

And of course, the title of the book is The Mantle, you know, this is our top surface layer.

But I think what I was really interested in when I was thinking about geology was these questions and these ideas around deep time.

So, I'm just fascinated by rocks.

I remember when I was a little kid I really wanted to be a geologist, and I think the fun thing about being a writer is that you can kind of live out some of those desires, you know, I get to read all about geology and go so deep with that without, you know, having to do the university degrees or anything.

But I was really interested in kind of inheritance and sort of considering what we leave behind, especially at this moment in time where things seem to be happening so quickly and, you know, like with the extinction crisis.

So...

things seem to be like slipping through our fingers.

But when we think about deep time, we have this immense sort of almost unimaginable expanse of time.

But you can hold a fossil in your hand, you know, you can see those memories embedded in the rock, so all those themes are kind of swirling through the book, through Ursula's profession.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And this huge grief around how fast the environment is changing is really one of the main drivers of the book.

Oh, I've just got so much to say about salmon farms.