LATE NIGHTS
ON AIR

Elizabeth Hay's new novel is set in motion when a man hears a voice on the radio and falls in love. The story begins 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: 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 at the following websites:

The Spectator (UK)
Times Literary Supplement
New York Times Sunday Book Review
Washington Post
Georgia Straight
Ottawa Citizen
Quill and Quire, author profile
The Tyee
bookbag.co.uk
Pickle Me This
"12 or 20 Questions" Interview with Elizabeth Hay

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