Synopses & Reviews
The eagerly anticipated novel from the bestselling author of
A Student of Weather and
Garbo Laughs.
Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined.
Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric, utterly loveable characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, form the centre. One summer, on a canoe trip four of them make into the Arctic wilderness (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who, along with his small party, starved to death in the barrens in 1927), they find the balance of love shifting, much as the balance of power in the North is being changed by the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, which threatens to displace Native people from their land.
Elizabeth Hay has been compared to Annie Proulx, Alice Hoffman, and Isabel Allende, yet she is uniquely herself. With unforgettable characters, vividly evoked settings, in this new novel, Hay brings to bear her skewering intelligence into the frailties of the human heart and her ability to tell a spellbinding story. Written in gorgeous prose, laced with dark humour, Late Nights On Air is Hay's most seductive and accomplished novel yet, and is already garnering interest abroad.
On the shortest night of the year, a golden evening without end, Dido climbed the wooden stepsto Pilot's Monument on top of the great Rock that formed the heart of old Yellowknife. In the Netherlands the light was long and gradual too, but more meadowy, more watery, or else hazier, depending on where you were....Here, it was subarctic desert, virtually unpopulated, and the light was uniformly clear.
On the road below, a small man in a black beret was bending over his tripod just as her father used to bend over his tape recorder. Her father's voice had become the wallpaper inside her skull, he'd made a home for himself there as improvised and unexpected as these little houses on the side of the Rock houses with histories of instability, of changing from gambling den to barber shop to sheet metal shop to private home, and of being moved from one part of town to another since they had no foundations.
From Late Nights On Air
Review
"The sheer ordinariness of existence in the most atypical of settings is Hay's preferred territory, which she mines with prodigious skill." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Equal parts Northern Exposure and Lost in the Barrens, this novel, already the winner of Canada's prestigious Giller Prize, compellingly captures one of the many small moments in which the Canadian North began to lose its essence." Library Journal
Synopsis
The Giller Prize-winning novel from the #1 bestselling author of All Things Consoled. "A pleasure from start to finish" (Toronto Star). 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.
"Hay's writing is so alluring and her lost souls so endearing that you'll lean in to catch the story's delicate developments as these characters shuffle along through quiet desperation and yearning." --The Washington Post
"Hay's spare, nuanced writing reflects the landscape of northern Canada . . . The novel unfolds as a long, lovely examination of how we learn to see ourselves in the places we choose to live." --The Associated Press
Synopsis
It's 1975 when beautiful Dido Paris arrives at the radio station in Yellowknife, a frontier town in the Canadian north. Her enchanting voice 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, inspiring many people to find their voices for the first time. This is the moment before television conquers the north's attention, when the future of the Arctic hangs in the balance. After the snow melts, four members of the radio station take a long canoe trip into the Barrens, a mysterious landscape of lingering ice and 24-hour light. The unexpected turns lethal is it too late for Dido and Harry? Stark, witty, and dynamically charged, this dazzling tale embodies the power of a place and of the human voice to breed love and haunt the memory.