Review of 'Mantle' by Romy Ash

Review of 'Mantle' by Romy Ash

Release date: April 28th, 2026

Publisher: Ultimo Press

📚

What the book is about:

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. 

💐

REVIEW

This is the first literary fiction novel I have read by Romy Ash but after reading Mantle, with an environmental apocalyptic theme, I am keen to read more of her work. I must say the cover is gorgeous with a beautiful array of rich colour that certainly represents both the sea world and the novel’s hidden depths. If we pull our camera lens out of the water and look upwards to the sky and landscape that surrounds, we see the south east Tasmanian coastline that is wild, unpredictable and a force to be reckoned with. Just like this unique story that draws you in and wraps its tentacles around your heart and moves you to a variety of emotions!

Mantle is creative, humorous, haunting and strange. The prose is lyrical, poetic and carefully crafted. It gave me much to ponder and savour. I loved the opening page that paints a breath taking scene. I felt transported to the character’s location and what she sees (and I remember its stunning grandeur from a past trip to this area). And then I turn the page and the contrast from the beauty of the region to the ugliness of oncoming human death, hits hard. A reality that bites.

This novels delves into some hefty topics: death, grief and love. But it reveals how connected we are to each other and the environment. We know the world we live in can seriously affect our existence and the responsibility to be good stewards of it is vital. Health should never be taken for granted and we cannot expect that everything will remain the same around us. But when a virus hits and you are not sure how it entered or how to stop it, well that can be scary. I could not help but think of COVID, when the novel describes this strange virus and how quickly it spreads throughout the island and its inhabitants.

The story circles around Ursula, a geologist who has been working on the mainland but returns home to care for her ill mother. The inner emotional turmoil she experiences is pitted against the external one where things have gone awry. And then there is the local salmon acqua culture industry, something I know a fair bit about. I had many a conversations out on the water back home in Canada with my father before he passed. He had many concerns for the issues it caused and would continue to create. So the information on this topic in Mantle, I can relate to from personal experience.

We get to know Ursula’s mother for a bit before the worst happens. When she tries to speak, it is with much effort. Her lungs are in peril yet she tries to tell her daughter about a woman she read about who everyone thought had lung cancer. But when the medical team entered her body (surgery), they found she had inhaled a fir pine seed and a small tree was growing inside her lung. Well, that is a bizarre image but suitably placed in this story. Ironically, I read on line (whether true or not) where a man in Russia had this very thing happen to him. So the author may have been inspired by this telling and included it in her novel. Is it an urban myth, I don’t know, but normally a tree could not grow in a dark space like the human body for without photosynthesis it is unlikely to succeed.

We follow Ursula’s last days with her mother and the smell of impending death leaps off the page. So much is familiar as we have all most likely experienced something similar in our loved ones. The small talk, the hard conversations and the need to fill an empty space with words to ward off the shadows are ever present. As noted on these pages, the ‘waiting’ period can be challenging. And when that time comes, we feel Ursula’s shock and what follows after.

All through the reading, I observed, studied and appreciated Ursula’s inner journey as she tries to make sense of the state of things. I definitely felt her intense internal conflict in this waltz through the exploration of the human condition. And the story, true to its genre, leaves us with an open-ended ambiguous conclusion. It was an intriguing novel to read and it certainly gave me lots to consider! 4 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thanks to Ultimo Press for the review copy.