Late Nights on Air, Elizabeth Hay
Late Nights on Air, Elizabeth Hay
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Late Nights on Air

Author: Elizabeth Hay

Narrator: Elizabeth Hay

Unabridged: 11 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/18/2018


Synopsis

The Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning novel from Elizabeth Hay.

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.

With unforgettable characters, vividly evoked settings, in this award–winning 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.

About The Author

ELIZABETH HAY is the Giller Prize-winning author of six novels, including Late Nights on Air, His Whole Life, and A Student of Weather. Her memoir All Things Consoled won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction; her story collection Small Change was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. A former radio broadcaster, she spent a number of years in Mexico and New York City, and makes her home in Ottawa.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Maciek on April 28, 2014

I'm surprised that this novel won the Giller Prize - one of Canada's most prestigious literary awards. The pacing is glacial, the characters uninteresting, and there's no real plot; the whole book is a collection of situations which happen to the cast, and since we have no real reason to care about......more

Goodreads review by Zinta on August 10, 2009

You’ve heard it said, “hurts so good.” About the writing style of Elizabeth Hay, I can say: cuts so soft. Her words, her turn of phrase, her sweet sentence construction, it is as precise and expertly sculpted as with a sculptor’s chisel or a surgeon’s scalpel. Yet soft. The sharpest knife enters you......more

Goodreads review by Mary on February 05, 2009

I almost didn't finish this book. The first 60 pages were tiresome to drag myself through. Then Ms. Hay caught me with something so "Northern Canada" that I was immediately hooked. It was a print out of messages that CBC used to read over the air -- things like " Joe Blogs, get in touch with the RCM......more


Quotes

#1 National Bestseller

"Elizabeth Hay has created her own niche in Canadian fiction by fastening her intelligence on the real stuff—the bumps and glories in love, kinship, friendship." —Toronto Star

"Hay exposes the beauty simmering in the heart of harsh settings with an evocative grace that brings to mind Annie Proulx." —Washington Post

"Dazzling. . . . A flawlessly crafted and timeless story, masterfully told." —Jury citation, the Scotiabank Giller Prize

"Exquisite. . . . Hay creates enormous spaces with few words, and makes the reader party to the journey, listening, marvelling. . . ." —Globe and Mail

"This is Hay's best novel yet." —Marni Jackson, The Walrus

"Invites comparison with work by Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. Outside Canada, one thinks of A.S. Byatt or Annie Proulx." —Times Literary Supplement

"Written by a master storyteller." —Winnipeg Free Press

"Psychologically astute, richly rendered and deftly paced. It's a pleasure from start to finish." —Toronto Star


Awards

  • IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
  • Scotiabank Giller Prize