Harry Abley was a nightmare of a father: depressive, self-absorbed, unpredictable, emotionally unstable. He was also a dream of a father: gentle, courageous, artistically gifted. Mark Abley, his only child, grew up in the shadow of music and mental illness. How he came to terms with this divided legacy, and how he learned to be a man in the absence of a traditional masculine role model, are central to this beautifully written memoir. This extraordinary story will speak to all those who love music, who struggle with depression, or who wrestle with the difficult bonds of love between a parent and a child. Praise for The Organist: "A wise and haunting book." -Martha Baillie, author of The Search for Heinrich Schloegel "The Organist is a rich and wonderful book, a deeply insightful and moving story of a family's journey through the 20th century....Abley's tale is fearless in its revelations, yet also loving, funny, and beautifully told." -Ronald Wright, author of A Scientific Romance and A Short History of Progress "'What does a life add up to?' This question is central to Mark Abley's haunting family memoir, The Organist. Both expansive in the themes it raises and intimate in details required to bring those themes to life, it's a question that draws on Abley's talents as a remarkably clear and thoughtful writer. In The Organist, he ventures bravely into territory that is, for almost everyone, mysterious: what our parents were like before we, their children, became (so we like to imagine) central to their lives. What this compelling book makes clear is that what we don't know about them is often what we don't know about ourselves." -David Macfarlane, author of The Danger Tree "Beautiful, tender, and raging, The Organist comes from where the best writing usually does-deep emotion affirmed by hard-won experience of how humans are in their relationships, and in their own hearts. It has taken Mark Abley nearly a lifetime to produce the book of his life. Not a moment too late, or too soon" -Charles Foran, author of Mordecai: The Life & Times

Harry Abley was a nightmare of a father: depressive, self-absorbed, unpredictable, emotionally unstable. He was also a dream of a father: gentle, courageous, artistically gifted. Mark Abley, his only child, grew up in the shadow of music and mental illness. How he came to terms with this divided legacy, and how he learned to be a man in the absence of a traditional masculine role model, are central to this beautifully written memoir. This extraordinary story will speak to all those who love music, who struggle with depression, or who wrestle with the difficult bonds of love between a parent and a child. Praise for The Organist: "A wise and haunting book." -Martha Baillie, author of The Search for Heinrich Schloegel "The Organist is a rich and wonderful book, a deeply insightful and moving story of a family's journey through the 20th century....Abley's tale is fearless in its revelations, yet also loving, funny, and beautifully told." -Ronald Wright, author of A Scientific Romance and A Short History of Progress "'What does a life add up to?' This question is central to Mark Abley's haunting family memoir, The Organist. Both expansive in the themes it raises and intimate in details required to bring those themes to life, it's a question that draws on Abley's talents as a remarkably clear and thoughtful writer. In The Organist, he ventures bravely into territory that is, for almost everyone, mysterious: what our parents were like before we, their children, became (so we like to imagine) central to their lives. What this compelling book makes clear is that what we don't know about them is often what we don't know about ourselves." -David Macfarlane, author of The Danger Tree "Beautiful, tender, and raging, The Organist comes from where the best writing usually does-deep emotion affirmed by hard-won experience of how humans are in their relationships, and in their own hearts. It has taken Mark Abley nearly a lifetime to produce the book of his life. Not a moment too late, or too soon" -Charles Foran, author of Mordecai: The Life & Times

A poet and journalist looks back on a remarkable journey from Turkey to Nepal in 1978, when the region was on the brink of massive transformation. In the spring of 1978, at age twenty-two, Mark Abley put aside his studies at Oxford and set off with a friend on a three-month trek across the celebrated Hippie Trail - a sprawling route between Europe and South Asia, peppered with Western bohemians and vagabonds. It was a time when the Shah of Iran still reigned supreme, Afghanistan lay at peace, and city streets from Turkey to India teemed with unrest. Within a year, many of the places he visited would become inaccessible to foreign travellers. Drawing from the tattered notebooks he filled as a youthful wanderer, Abley brings his kaleidoscope of experiences back to life with vivid detail: dancing in a Turkish disco, clambering across a glacier in Kashmir, travelling by train among Baluchi tribesmen who smuggled kitchen appliances over international borders. He also reflects on the impact of the Hippie Trail and the illusions of those who journeyed along it. The lively immediacy of Abley's journals combined with the measured wisdom of his mature, contemporary voice provides rich insight, bringing vibrant witness and historical perspective to this beautifully written portrait of a region during a time of irrevocable change.

In Spoken Here, Mark Abley takes us on a world tour from the Arctic Circle to Oklahoma to Australia in a fervent quest to document some of the world's most endangered languages. His mission is urgent: Of the six thousand languages spoken in the world today, only six hundred may survive into the next century. Abley visits the exotic and frequently remote locales that are home to fading languages and constructs engaging and entertaining portraits of some of the last living speakers of these tongues. Throughout this exhilarating travelogue, he points out that the same forces that put biological species at risk -- development, globalization, loss of habitat -- are also threatening human languages, and with them, something very basic about their speakers' cultures.