Winner of the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize
2008 Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year

Elizabeth Hay's new novel is set in motion when a man hears a voice on the radio and falls in love. The story is set in 1970s Yellowknife and centres around the loves, rivalries, and entanglements of a small and unlikely group who work at the local radio station. One summer they embark on a canoe trip that takes them into the arctic wilderness, following in the footsteps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who starved to death in the Barrens in 1927. In the wilds 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. Weaving stories from the past into the present, Hay builds a fresh, erotic, darkly witty and moving tale about the power of a voice and of a place to generate love and haunt the memory. Like radio, the novel creates sudden intimacy over long distances, and like the North, it is spare, compelling, and charged with unusual life.

Reading Group Guide available at www.BookClubs.ca.
Watch a video of Elizabeth Hay discussing her novel at www.BookLounge.ca.

Elegiac .... exquisite .... Hay creates enormous spaces with few words, and makes the reader party to the journey, listening, marvelling, breathing, fearing . Globe and Mail

In the Ottawa writer's terrific new novel, the barren, treeless tundra of the Far North serves as a kind of reckoning ground for a clutch of characters. They're not visionaries, but all seekers in some way.... Psychologically astute, richly rendered and deftly paced. It's a pleasure from start to finish. Toronto Star

Two couples embark on a six-week canoe trip where the evocation of the tundra - its emptiness, silence, and delicate beauty - is stunning, almost a new species of erotica. Hay portrays the tender bonds that are forged (and broken) in such wild places .... Nothing seems to escape her. This is Hay's best novel yet. The Walrus

Read more reviews of Late Nights on Air

Canadian Edition: Late Nights on Air, McClelland & Stewart, 2007, ISBN 978-0-7710-3811-2

Winner of the Ottawa Book Award * Finalist for the Governor General’s Award * Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year * Quill & Quire Top Five Canadian Fiction Book of the Year * Maclean’s Top Ten Book of the Year

A witty and poignant novel about the tug of war between real love and movie romance.

Safely ensconced at the centre of a tight group of cinephiles is tall, dreamy Harriet Browning, a woman inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child. With her eyes so intent on the screen, she fails to see her real-life leading man, whose own glances are about to seek out greener fields. Even the most fervent cinematic addiction can't keep reality – with its sudden shocks and shifting allegiances – at bay forever. In this bittersweet comedy of secondhand desire, Elizabeth Hay has written a virtuoso novel about the costs and rewards of falling in love with the movies.

Reading Group Guides available at Chapter by Chapter Movie Guide
and Reader’s Guide

From start to finish, this book is perfect, and as lovely to behold as it is beautifully written. Guardian (U.K.)

A novel so subtle and so wonderfully layered that it resembles a black-and-white movie of a certain era, full of elegance, aura and wit. Globe and Mail

Thoughtful, smart, sardonically funny, Ottawa’s 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

If you love movies, you’ll be enchanted. Chicago Tribune

Elizabeth Hay is a sinfully good writer to watch out for. Garbo Laughs rates five stars. www.curledup.com/garbo.htm

Order from your local bookstore.
Canadian edition: Garbo Laughs, McClelland & Stewart, 2003, ISBN 0-7710-3793-7
U.S. edition: Garbo Laughs, Counterpoint, 2003, ISBN 1-58243-291-0
U.K. edition: Garbo Laughs, Constable & Robinson, 2004, ISBN 1-84119-895-1

Giller Prize Finalist * TORGI Award * CAA MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction * Pearson Canada Reader’s Choice Award Finalist * Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year

From some accidents of love and weather we never quite recover. At the worst of the Prairie dust bowl of the 1930s, a young man appears out of a blizzard and alters the lives of two sisters, beautiful Lucinda and small, dark Norma Joyce. Their rivalry sets the stage for all that follows in a narrative spanning over thirty years, beginning in Saskatchewan and moving, in the decades after the war, to Ottawa and New York City.

Disarming, vividly told, unforgettable, this is a story about the mistakes we make that never go away. About how the things we want to keep vanish and the things we want to lose return to haunt us.

Reading Group Guide available at Reader’s Guide.

Enormously moving ... An unsentimental testament to resilience and mettle .. A triumphant novel. Newsday

Top-flight fiction keeps arriving from Canada with remarkable frequency these days. This time, the high standards set by Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, and others are matched – and then some.... Brilliant. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

This is a book to break (and warm) your heart over and over ... Hay’s language is precise, economical and evocative. In A Student of Weather every word counts. Ottawa Citizen

Hay exposes the beauty simmering in the heart of harsh settings with an evocative grace that brings to mind Annie Proulx .... I was so moved ... that I wanted to go back to the beginning and start again. The Washington Post

Order from your local bookstore.
Canadian edition: A Student of Weather, McClelland & Stewart, 2000, ISBN 0-7710-3790-2
U.S. edition: A Student of Weather, Counterpoint, 2001, ISBN 1-58243-181-7
U.K. edition: A Student of Weather, Constable, 2004, ISBN 1-84119-928-1

Finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize

These superbly crafted twenty linked stories 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 favour with a neighbourhood girl. An intricate story of two women reveals a friendship held together by the steely bonds of passivity. A chance sighting in a library prompts a woman to recall the “unconsummated courtship” she was drawn into by a male colleague.
With trenchant insight, uncommon honesty, and dark humour, 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.

Reading Group Guide available at Reader’s Guide.

Compelling .... These linked stories are not so much conventional narratives as unflinching meditations on ambivalent love, the only love worth writing about, as John Updike once said. What readers and even literary jurors are responding to is how close to the bone Hay’s fiction is. Montreal Gazette

Tightly sprung stories, beautifully balanced, and eminently re-readable. Quill & Quire

Hay brings together in her fourth book the revelatory power of narrative, the analytical possibilities of the personal essay and memoir, the investigative discipline of journalism, and the sudden illumination of lyric, and as a result she seems able to pick up almost everything – everything said, and most of what is only whispered in a gesture or a look between friends. Malahat Review

Order from your local bookstore.
Canadian edition: Small Change, McClelland & Stewart, 2000, ISBN 0-7710-3791-0
U.S. edition: Small Change, Counterpoint, 2001, ISBN 07710-3793-7

‘Captivity tales,’ stories of settlers kidnapped by Indians, are turned on their head in this book about captivity in the city.

Stranded in Manhattan with her family, Elizabeth Hay searches for company and finds it in the lives of other Canadians who have come to New York City, among them, Inuit visitors in the nineteenth century and various artists like Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, Glenn Gould and Teresa Stratas. In searching out their stories, Hay finds a new map, an underworld of memory and connection, that offers a way home.
A fresh, engaging exploration of personal and cultural identity, Captivity Tales evokes the desperate need to find yourself by losing yourself, and to return home by escaping from it.

A poetic compilation, like a Hieronymous Bosch scene, pulsing with images and sounds that resonate against one another .... A bittersweet chorale of whispers about absence and longing. I recommend bending an ear. Books in Canada

Hay’s interweaving of recollection, remembrance, association, history, biography and Native legend is nothing short of brilliant. Canadian Book Review Annual

Compulsively readable. Quill & Quire

Order from your local bookstore, or from New Star Books. info@NewStarBooks.com
Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York, New Star Books, 1993, ISBN 0-921586-32-9

Co-winner, Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-fiction

At once a personal reflection about identity, a poetic history of snow and fur, and a travel book about home.

Mexico and New York City provide the setting for an exploration of Canada’s early past and of the narrator’s own connection with the North. Stories about the fur trade weave together with memories of a broken marriage as Hay navigates a new love and a new life.
The blend of autobiography, biography and history becomes a new form of arctic literature about the search for a north-south passage and “an indirect route along yellow silk, home.”

Imaginary, inventive, filled with its own light in rather a similar way to an Impressionist painting. It has a unique gleaming quality. George Woodcock

The writing is a constant joy, alive with simple images that strike to the heart, a clarity of expression that is like clean air, observations that stop on the page. The book floats in the mind after it is read, like poetry. Canadian Book Review Annual

Captivity Tales and The Only Snow in Havana are marked by a style and sensibility that have the same fullness and restraint found in Glenn Gould’s music and David Milne’s art. The Ottawa Citizen

Order from your local bookstore, or from Cormorant Books. cormorantbooksinc@bellnet.ca
The Only Snow in Havana, Cormorant Books, 1992, ISBN 0-920953-80-8