In the winter of 2008, as snow falls without interruption, an actor in a Beckett play blanks on her lines. Panicked and ashamed, Lulu Blake escapes to Snow Road Station and her old friend Nan. Now she has to figure out what she’s to do with the last act of her life.

Elizabeth Hay’s memoir about her formidable parents begins with the crisis in her mother’s health and her father’s dismay. This once ferociously independent pair can no longer manage on their own and have to rely on their children, especially Lizzie. As old age collides with the tragedy of living too long, their lives change utterly and so does hers.

Starting with something as simple as a boy who wants a dog, His Whole Life takes us into a rich and intimate world where everything that matters is at risk: family, nature, country, home.

Harry Boyd, a world-weary, washed-up television broadcaster, has returned to a small radio station in the remote reaches of the Canadian North. There, in the golden summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real Dido Paris is even more than he imagined.

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.

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.

Fourteen interwoven stories that comprise a sensual journey from north to south, in search of warmth and vivid colour. In the process the author explores the shifting climates of love: how we blow hot and cold on each other, and on ourselves, even as we long for lasting generosity and profound attachment.

“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.

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.