Books : Literature & Fiction : World Literature : Canadian : Women Writers : Authors, A-Z : Hay, Elizabeth

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Late Nights on Air: A Novel

Elizabeth Hay

It’s 1975 when beautiful Dido Paris arrives at the radio station in Yellowknife, a frontier town in the Canadian north. She disarms hard-bitten broadcaster Harry Boyd and electrifies the station, setting into motion rivalries both professional and sexual.

As the drama at the station unfolds, a proposed gas pipeline threatens to rip open the land and inspires many people to find their voices for the first time.This is the moment before television conquers the north’s attention, when the fate of the Arctic hangs in the balance.

After the snow melts, members of the radio station take a long canoe trip into the Barrens, a mysterious landscape of lingering ice and infinite light that exposes them to all the dangers of the ever-changing air.

Spare, witty, and dynamically charged, this compelling tale embodies the power of a place and of the human voice to generate love and haunt the memory.
A Student of Weather

Elizabeth Hay

Norma Joyce and Lucinda are two sisters who live with their widowed father on a farm in the dust bowl of Saskatchewan in the depression era. Norma Joyce, the younger, is as dark and fiercely intelligent as Lucinda is fair, beautiful and saintly. When Maurice, a young student, arrives from Ottawa to stay with them and study the region's strange weather patterns both girls fall in love, but Norma Joyce becomes irretrievably - and unrequitedly - obsessed. The rivalry in love sets the stage for all that follows in the lives of the two sisters, until eventually we discover the facts of a childhood betrayal significant enough to devastate everyone involved. Disarming, vividly told and unforgettable, this is a story about the mistakes we make when young that never go away, about how the things we long to keep vanish, and those we want to forget always return to haunt us.
Small Change

Elizabeth Hay

An award-winning collection of linked stories about women and friendship by the acclaimed author of A Student of Weather.
Small Change is a superbly crafted collection of linked stories that navigate the difficult realm of friendship, charting its beginnings and endings, its intimacies and betrayals, its joys and humiliations. A mother learns something of the nature of love from watching her young daughter as she falls in and out of favor with a neighborhood girl. An intricate story of two women reveals a friendship held together by the steely bonds of passivity.
With trenchant insight, uncommon honesty, and dark humor, Elizabeth Hay probes the precarious bonds that exist between friends. The result is an emotionally raw and provocative collection of stories that will resonate with readers long after the final page. Small Change was a finalist for the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Award, and the Rogers Communication Writer's Trust Fiction Prize.
Garbo Laughs

Elizabeth Hay
Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York

Elizabeth Hay

Captivity Tales, stories of settlers kidnapped by Indians, are turned on their head in this book about captivity in the city. Stranded in New York with her family, Elizabeth Hay searches for company and finds it in the lives of other Canadians who have come to New York: Inuit visitors in th 19th century, artists like Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, Glenn Gould and Teresa Stratas. In searching out their stories, she finds a new map, an underworld of memory and connection, which offers a way home. A fresh, engaging exploration of Canadian cultural identity, Captivity Tales evokes the desperate need to find yourself by losing yourself, and to return home by escaping from it.