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.

Set in Ottawa, during the time of the ice storm, a young woman organizes a Friday movie club. Real life can't compete with the movies or can it?

A Student of Weather is the brilliant first novel by acclaimed storywriter, Elizabeth Hay. It tells the story of the rivalry between two contrasting sisters and of a stranger who changes both of their lives forever. Spanning thirty years, it opens in the Prairie Dust Bowl of the 1930s and, later, in the decades following the war, moves back and forth between Ottawa and New York City. Maurice Dove is a visitor to the Saskatchewan farm of widower Ernest Hardy. The relationship he forms with Hardy's daughters—the beautiful, virtuous Lucinda and the dark, intelligent, younger Norma-Joyce—gives rise to an act of betrayal that throws into relief the deep-rooted enmity between them. Norma-Joyce's life, from the time she is eight, is fueled by her obsessive (and unrequited) love for Maurice Dove. Later, in pursuing her life as an artist, she makes discoveries about her past that bring the story full-circle. Hay's evocation of place is palpable, vivid; her characters at once eccentric and familiar. Norma-Joyce, once a strange, dark, self-possessed child, becomes a woman who learns something about self-forgiveness and of the redemptive power of art. Hay's writing is spare, richly textured, dark and erotic. The physical and emotional landscapes she portrays evoke tragic and comic surprises, and remind us about the lasting imprint of first love.

"In one of the earliest works by the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner, Elizabeth Hay collects a series of reflections on life, identity, history, and love, drifting through her many homes -- Yellowknife, Mexico City, Toronto, and New York City -- to consider Canadian identity. Hay reflects on the idea of being Canadian -- what it means, who we are, how do we act, how do we live -- and compares it to the world around her in stunning detail, drawing the disparate locations together by their connection to the history of the early Canadian fur trade and our hearty adoration of snow. She writes of the heart of a country, the history of a people that live on the brink of identity. Blending memoir, biography, and history in a provocative intensity, Hay’s style and talent shines through in this early work, proving her well on the road to her long and lustrous career."--pub. desc.