A STUDENT
OF WEATHER

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 GUIDES:

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

Read more reviews of A Student of Weather at the following websites:

Newsday
Book Clubs
Curled Up
NYTimes
Historical Novels Review