New Releases by Elizabeth Hay

From the Giller Prize-winning author comes a novel, witty and wise, about thwarted ambition, unrealized dreams, the enduring bonds of female friendship, and love’s capacity to surprise us at any age. In the winter of 2008, as snow falls without interruption, an actor in a Beckett play blanks on her lines. Fleeing the theatre, she beats a retreat into her past and arrives at Snow Road Station, a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario. The actor is Lulu Blake, in her sixties now, a sexy, seemingly unfooled woman well-versed in taking risks. Out of work, humiliated, she enters the last act of her life wondering what she can make of her diminished self. In Snow Road Station she decides she is through with drama—but drama, it turns out, isn’t through with her. She thinks she wants peace. It turns out she wants more. Looming in the background is that autumn’s global financial meltdown, while in the foreground family and friends animate a round of weddings, sap harvests, love affairs, and personal turmoil. At the centre of it all is the friendship between Lulu and Nan. As the two women contemplate growing old, they surrender certain long-held dreams and confront the limits of the choices they’ve made and the messy feelings that kept them apart for decades.

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.

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.

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.

The adventure starts when Tess and her mother move into a colorful house on Crayon Court. Being a curious little person, Tess wants to meet her new neighbors. A delightfully friendly group lives on Crayon Court, yet each one warns her not to go to the red house. Finding the answer to "What is so wrong with the red house?" leads Tess to make an unexpected friend, discover some amazing magic, and bring a colorful neighborhood back together again.

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.

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 forever alters the lives of two sisters. There is the beautiful, fastidious Lucinda, and the tricky and tenacious Norma Joyce, at first a strange, self-possessed child, later a woman who learns something of self-forgiveness and of the redemptive nature of art. Their rivalry sets the stage for all that follows in a narrative spanning over thirty years, beginning in Saskatchewan and moving, in the decades following 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.

Winner of the Ottawa Book Award Finalist for the Governor General''s Literary Award A Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year A Quill & Quire Top Five Canadian Fiction Book of the Year A Maclean’s Top Ten Book of the Year Elizabeth Hay’s runaway national bestseller is a funny, sad-eyed, deliciously entertaining novel about a woman caught in a tug of war between real life and the films of the past. Inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child, Harriet Browning forms a Friday-night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named after Dinah Shore. Into this idiosyncratic world, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood: Harriet’s Aunt Leah, the jaded widow of a screenwriter blacklisted in the 1950s, and her sardonic, often overbearing stepson, Jack. They bring harsh reality and illuminate the pull of family and friendship, the sting of infidelity and revenge, the shock of illness and sudden loss. Poignant, brilliant, and delightfully droll, Garbo Laughs reveals how the dramas of everyday life are sometimes the most astonishing of all.

The Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning novel from Elizabeth Hay. Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined. Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric, utterly loveable characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, form the centre. One summer, on a canoe trip four of them make into the Arctic wilderness (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who, along with his small party, starved to death in the barrens in 1927), 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, which threatens to displace Native people from their land. With unforgettable characters, vividly evoked settings, in this award–winning novel, Hay brings to bear her skewering intelligence into the frailties of the human heart and her ability to tell a spellbinding story. Written in gorgeous prose, laced with dark humour, Late Nights on Air is Hay’s most seductive and accomplished novel yet.

"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.

This is the sixteenth edition of this nationally acclaimed anthology, which has established itself as Canada’s most popular fiction anthology, presenting the best new Canadian writers from coast to coast. As well as receiving high praise every year, it is an important indicator of up-and-coming writers. Past winners include Yann Martel, Cynthia Flood, Alissa York, Kevin Armstrong, Timothy Taylor, and Jessica Grant. These writers and many others whose stories have appeared in the anthology – André Alexis, David Bergen, Dennis Bock, Terry Griggs, Elizabeth Hay, Steven Heighton, Elise Levine, Annabel Lyon, Robert McGill, Lisa Moore, Nancy Richler, Madeleine Thien, and M.G. Vassanji – have gone on to become finalists or winners of some of Canada’s most prestigious literary awards. This fiction anthology sets itself apart from others in that editors of literary journals across the country submit what, in their view, is the most exciting writing in English they have published in the previous year. The winner of the $10,000 Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize, and the journal which published the winning piece, will be announced in the spring of 2005 as part of The Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Great Literary Awards event.

This early non-fiction work by critically acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Hay displays the qualities that have resonated with readers --- the pitch-perfect register of human psychology, the clear, unsentimental yet intimate sentences --- in her bestselling novels "A Student of Weather," "Garbo Laughs," "Late Nights on Air," and "Alone In the Classroom." "Captivity Tales," stories of settlers kidnapped by Indians, are turned on their head in this book about captivity in the city. Stranded in New York with her family, Elizabeth Hay searches for company and finds it in the lives of other Canadians who have come to New York: Inuit visitors in th 19th century, artists like Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, Glenn Gould and Teresa Stratas. In searching out their stories, she finds a new map, an underworld of memory and connection, which offers a way home. A fresh, engaging exploration of Canadian cultural identity, "Captivity Tales" evokes the desperate need to find yourself by losing yourself, and to return home by escaping from it.