Elizabeth Hay

In 1975 Yellowknife, four employees of a small radio station embark on a canoe trip that takes them into the Arctic wilderness, following the 1927 route taken by ill-fated Englishman John Hornby, and find their relationships shifting.

Late Nights on Air

A Novel

Snow Road Station

Connie's niece, Anne, tells the story. Impelled by curiosity about her dynamic, adventurous aunt and her more conventional mother, she revisits Connie's past and her mother's broken childhood. In the process, she unravels the enigma of Parley Burns and the mysterious (and unrelated) deaths of two young girls.--"BOOK JACKET.

Alone in the Classroom

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.

A Student of Weather

From the #1 nationally bestselling, Giller Prize-winning author of Late Nights on Air and Alone in the Classroom, comes an irresistible new novel that has everything we would hope for from this celebrated author -- and more. Starting with something as simple as a boy who wants a dog, His Whole Life takes us into a richly intimate world where everything that matters to him is at risk: family, nature, home. At the outset ten-year-old Jim and his Canadian mother and American father are on a journey from New York City to a lake in eastern Ontario during the last hot days of August. What unfolds is a completely enveloping story that spans a few pivotal years of his youth. Moving from city to country, summer to winter, wellbeing to illness, the novel charts the deepening bond between mother and son even as the family comes apart. Set in the mid-1990s, when Quebec is on the verge of leaving Canada, this captivating novel is an unconventional coming of age story as only Elizabeth Hay could tell it. It draws readers in with its warmth, wisdom, its vivid sense of place, its searching honesty, and nuanced portrait of the lives of one family and those closest to it. Hay explores the mystery of how members of a family can hurt each other so deeply, and remember those hurts in such detail, yet find openings that shock them with love and forgiveness. This is vintage Elizabeth Hay at the height of her powers.

His Whole Life

"Elizabeth Hay, one of Canada's most beloved novelists has written a poignant, complex, and hugely resonant memoir about the shift she experienced between being her parents' daughter to their guardian and caregiver. As the daughter takes charge, and the writer takes notes, her mother and father are like two legendary icebergs floating south. They melt into the ocean of partial, painful, inconsistent, and funny stories that a family makes over time. Hay's eloquent memoir distills these stories into basic truths about parents and children and their efforts of understanding. With her uncommon sharpness and wit, Elizabeth Hay offers her insights into the peculiarities of her family's dynamics--her parents' marriage, sibling rivalries, miscommunications that spur decades of resentment all matched by true and genuine love and devotion. Her parents are each startling characters in their own right--her mother is a true skinflint who would rather serve up wormy soup (twice) than throw away an ancient packet of "perfectly good" mix; her father is a proud and well-mannered man with a temper that can be explosive. When All Thing's Consoled is a startlingly beautiful memoir that addresses the exquisite agony of family, the unstoppable force of dementia, and the inevitability of aging."--

A Daughter's Memoir

All Things Consoled

In a story set against the backdrop of 1930s Dust Bowl Canada, two sisters fall for the same man, a visitor to the Saskatchewan farm of their widower father, igniting an emotional storm that has a profound impact on their lives. A first novel. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.

These twenty superbly crafted linked stories navigate the difficult realm of friendship, charting its beginnings and ends, 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.

Small Change

From Elizabeth Hay, one of Canada's beloved novelists, comes a startling and beautiful memoir about the drama of her parents' end, and the longer drama of being their daughter. Winner of the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonficiton. Jean and Gordon Hay were a colourful, formidable pair. Jean, a late-blooming artist with a marvellous sense of humour, was superlatively frugal; nothing got wasted, not even maggoty soup. Gordon was a proud and ambitious schoolteacher with a terrifying temper, a deep streak of melancholy, and a devotion to flowers, cars, words, and his wife. As old age collides with the tragedy of living too long, these once ferociously independent parents become increasingly dependent on Lizzie, the so-called difficult child. By looking after them in their final decline, she hopes to prove that she can be a good daughter after all. In this courageous memoir, written with tough-minded candour, tenderness, and wit, Elizabeth Hay lays bare the exquisite agony of a family's dynamics--entrenched favouritism, sibling rivalries, grievances that last for decades, genuine admiration, and enduring love. In the end, she reaches a more complete understanding of the most unforgettable characters she will ever know, the vivid giants in her life who were her parents.

A daughter's memoir

Hay is the winner of the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Ottawa Book Prize, and the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year for her novel Late Nights on Air. Hay's fourth novel, Alone in The Classroom is a Globe and Mail Best Book. In a small prairie school in 1929, Connie Flood helps a struggling student, Michael Graves, learn how to read. Observing them and darkening their lives is the principal, Parley Burns, whose strange behavior culminates in an attack so disturbing its repercussions continue to the present day. Connie's niece, Anne, tells the story. Impelled by curiosity about her dynamic, adventurous aunt and her more conventional mother, she revisits Connie's past and her mother's broken childhood. In the process she unravels the enigma of Parley Burns and the mysterious, and unrelated, deaths of two young girls. As the novel moves deeper into their lives, the triangle of principal, teacher, student opens out into other emotional triangles--aunt, niece, lover; mother, daughter, granddaughter--until a sudden, capsizing love thrusts Anne herself into a newly independent life. This spellbinding tale--set in Saskatchewan and the Ottawa Valley--crosses generations and cuts to the bone. It probes the roots of obsessive love and hate, how the hurts and desires of childhood persist and are passed on, as if in the blood. It lays bare the urgency of discovering what we were never told about the past. And it celebrates the process of becoming who we are in a world full of startling connections that lie just out of sight. From the Hardcover edition.

Le roman se déploie à différentes époques et en différents lieux, et il entremêle d’une manière habile les destins de plusieurs personnages. Il s’ouvre en 1937 sur le viol et l’assassinat d’une adolescente dans une petite ville de la vallée de l’Outaouais. Une des journalistes qui couvrent l’événement, Connie Flood, retrouve à cette occasion le principal de l’école primaire de Jewel, en Saskatchewan, où elle a enseigné en 1929. Elle avait alors 18 ans et avait pris en charge un élève jugé demeuré, mais qui était, en fait, dyslexique. Cette année-là, le principal, un homme d’une sévérité excessive, avait joué un rôle obscur dans la tragédie qui avait emporté la sœur de cet élève. L’histoire est racontée par la nièce de Connie qui cherche à élucider le passé de sa mère et se penche aussi sur celui de sa tante, qui exerce sur elle une grande fascination.

La solitude des écoliers

Harriet Browning becomes enmeshed in the old movies that she was deprived of as a child and views over and over again, until she no longer fits into the real world, until the arrival of two Hollywood refugees, the widow of a famous screenwriter and her movie-expert stepson, who bring her face to face with real life. By the author of A Student of Weather. Reprint.

Elizabeth Hay

About

Books

Join the club