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Late Nights on Air

3.43 of 5 stars 3.43 · rating details · 3,739 ratings · 382 reviews

The eagerly anticipated novel from the bestselling author of A Student of Weather and Garbo Laughs.

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 ev...more The eagerly anticipated novel from the bestselling author of A Student of Weather and Garbo Laughs.

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.

Elizabeth Hay has been compared to Annie Proulx, Alice Hoffman, and Isabel Allende, yet she is uniquely herself. With unforgettable characters, vividly evoked settings, in this new 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.

On the shortest night of the year, a golden evening without end, Dido climbed the wooden steps to Pilot’s Monument on top of the great Rock that formed the heart of old Yellowknife. In the Netherlands the light was long and gradual too, but more meadowy, more watery, or else hazier, depending on where you were. . . . Here, it was subarctic desert, virtually unpopulated, and the light was uniformly clear.

On the road below, a small man in a black beret was bending over his tripod just as her father used to bend over his tape recorder. Her father’s voice had become the wallpaper inside her skull, he’d made a home for himself there as improvised and unexpected as these little houses on the side of the Rock — houses with histories of instability, of changing from gambling den to barber shop to sheet metal shop to private home, and of being moved from one part of town to another since they had no foundations.
—From Late Nights On Air(less)

Hardcover, 364 pages

Published September 18th 2007 by McClelland & Stewart

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Best Canadian Literature

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Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill

Canada Reads 2011 - Top 40 Novels

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May 14, 2008 Hannah Holborn rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A character in Elizabeth's book describes good script writing as having simplicity, directness, and intimacy. Late Night on Air achieves all three. Whether we love or hate the main characters by the end of the book, we also know them as well as our own skin. And we know something of the north--its timeless fragility, and its ability to both save and destroy those who venture there.

7 likes · like · see review

Nov 22, 2008 Bonnie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed-books, canadian-author

I laughed and I cried and I marvelled and I kept reading in one long sitting.

Very deserving of The Giller, in my opinion.

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Feb 05, 2009 Mary S rated it 3 of 5 stars

I almost didn't finish this book. The first 60 pages were tiresome to drag myself through. Then Ms. Hay caught me with something so "Northern Canada" that I was immediately hooked. It was a print out of messages that CBC used to read over the air -- things like " Joe Blogs, get in touch with the RCMP at Fort Rae for an urgent message from your brother Ron." or "To the Blogs family, Resolute Bay. Jannie had her baby. A boy, 7 lbs 2 ounces. Mom and baby are doing well and say hi."

I lived for a sho...more

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Jul 11, 2008 Kathy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

I admit that I have an affection for Canadian writers. This is a beautifully written book, the characters are rendered in much detail and the plot is believable. I liked the world she creates in her story and the setting of the radio station is interesting.

Once I bought the book and looked at the author's photo I think that I may have met her when I was in Canada attending a music workshop. There were a bunch of writers who were also having a workshop in the same space. Funny coincidence.

A real...more

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Mar 31, 2009 Shannon rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: canadian-authors, bookclub

This book doesn't get much more Canadian: the Yukon, the weather, CBC radio and misfits and I almost forgot the McKenzie Pipeline Berger Commission. The descriptions of the weather make the weather one of the strongest characters in the book.

Unfortunately, the book is choppy: for the most part a sequence of disconnected scenarios. The promise of the radio station as a unifying theme is insufficiently developed; the shift to a wilderness adventure seems abrupt and not particularly credible in li...more

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Feb 04, 2009 Toni Osborne rated it 2 of 5 stars

In early 70's, Harry Boyd returns to Yellowknife to work at the local radio station, there he falls in love with Dido Paris, a novice broadcasters with a voice "like a tarnished silver spoon". Both are part of a cast of loveable eccentrics at the station. Reviving their pasts and what attracted them to the North is the centre of this story. Several affairs are set among the station staff and the story extends into the landscape where four of them embark on a six week canoe trip exploring the Art...more

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Mar 21, 2013 Judy Mann rated it 1 of 5 stars

Page 133- and I'm packing it in. This is the second book of Elizabeth Hay's that I have really wanted to like but I just cannot do it. This book just misses so badly.
I lived in the far north in the mid seventies as well and she is way off. She makes it sound like a cozy kaffeklatsch where all these DEEP and thoughtful people meet oh- just to talk.It was not like that at all.
It was a whole lot of Indians hating the whites and a whole lot of whites being scared out of their minds of the Indians wh...more Page 133- and I'm packing it in. This is the second book of Elizabeth Hay's that I have really wanted to like but I just cannot do it. This book just misses so badly.
I lived in the far north in the mid seventies as well and she is way off. She makes it sound like a cozy kaffeklatsch where all these DEEP and thoughtful people meet oh- just to talk.It was not like that at all.
It was a whole lot of Indians hating the whites and a whole lot of whites being scared out of their minds of the Indians who hated them.She has just missed all that. She has written a novel about all these sweet and lovable eccentric white people- completely ignoring the real life up there.
They all read deep white books and talk deep white talks and get right to the heart of matters but it just wasn't so.
It was up there that I learnt how people can rant and rave and tell these incredibley impersonal stories all night long.
She has told a story about the Great North ignoring the Great North.
And here's the double whammy. You want to like the book because it seems just so politically correct but in fact it's all liberal crap-it's all false. it's Indian land up there and all the reasonable Bergers and lily white CBC 'ers are not going to change that. They are all interloping on someone else's land. Period. End of story.
One last thing. 3 white explorers - Hornby etc. starve to death during the winter of 1926. Well what is so honourable about that???And in real life - strike me dead for saying this- but why didn't the survivors eat the other one who died? Because there is no reality in her book. It's all smarmy clammy puffed up nothing. A whole lot of sweet people going absolutely nowhere. Sorry. I really tried this time but I'm done.
To her credit the one thing she got right. the tablecloths in the pubs. All red and orange terrycloth with cigarette burns and the whole whole place smelling of stale beer. She got that right. And I miss it.I miss the great north proud and free. But not her's. Not her Great North.Not at all. Like I said- I'm done.JM(less)

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Sep 07, 2012 Sharon rated it 4 of 5 stars

I must confess a special affection for Canadian literature, especially when an author emphasizes what it means to live in a country of stark landscape and even starker weather. This book contains plenty of Canadian icons: the Yukon, the weather, CBC radio, First Nations and connection with traditional ways of life, the McKenzie Pipeline debate (the beginning of oil and gas development in Canada), the misfits who so often gravitate to Canada's sparsely populated landscapes. And typical of life in...more

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Jul 03, 2011 Janet McLarty Fretter rated it 4 of 5 stars

Loved this book, for many reasons. It didn't hurt that the themes reflected some of my biases: the worthy battle for the preservation of native language and culture in this vast country; the high value I place on CBC radio as the thread that runs through every community supporting and highlighting culture and helping us discover rich things about each other; the lament that TV has created a 'generation addicted to instant gratification'.
Hay's handling of language is skillful. She exercises such...more

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Feb 22, 2011 switterbug (Betsey) rated it 5 of 5 stars

"...this summer of 1975 took on the mythical quality of a cloudless summer before the outbreak of war, or before the onset of the kind of restlessness, social, spiritual, that remakes the world."

In the Canadian Northwest territories, a place of harsh winters and summers of unrelenting light, the hamlet of Yellowknife remains like an anachronism. Population ten thousand, including native people that have lived on this land for thousands of years; it was their flesh and blood. Now the Mackenzie Pi...more "...this summer of 1975 took on the mythical quality of a cloudless summer before the outbreak of war, or before the onset of the kind of restlessness, social, spiritual, that remakes the world."

In the Canadian Northwest territories, a place of harsh winters and summers of unrelenting light, the hamlet of Yellowknife remains like an anachronism. Population ten thousand, including native people that have lived on this land for thousands of years; it was their flesh and blood. Now the Mackenzie Pipeline project, a huge construction of an oil and gas pipeline, threatens to "rip open open the Arctic...like a razor slashing the face of the Mona Lisa."

A little radio station of the CBC is the center of the novel. Harry Boyd, the 40-something interim manager, whose luckless history of ill-repute but brilliance has brought him back to radio after a wash with TV, is an unlikely romantic. He has fallen in love with the sound of Dido Paris on air, a resonant, smoky-voiced and Netherlands-born young woman of unconventional beauty, a wide-shouldered, slim-hipped enigma of melancholy temperament. She was hired as a parting shot of the former manager.

Gwen Symon, a mousy young girl-woman from Ontario, has bravely driven herself in her Boler trailer all the way to Yellowknife to work in radio. She listened to a radio show as a child called "Death on the Barren Ground," about John Hornby, the Englishman who starved to death on an Arctic adventure into the Barrens in 1927. She has since read his biography, three times! Harry is familiar with Hornby's history and his biographer, who lives close by. He is willing to be patient with Gwen's parched and defenseless voice.

Eleanor Dew is the point person or office manager at Yellowknife radio, a woman who manages to be pretty even though no part of her is pretty. She is a striving poet and a thoughtful friend to everyone.

Eddy Fitzgerlad is the cipher, a radio technician of unknown other talents, a well-cut but terse, insolent man, an unsettling presence in the radio station, with his eye on Dido.

Ralph Cody is the radio book reviewer and prodigious photographer of the far North Canadian landscape, with small nicotine-stained hands that are deft with a camera and tripod.

This cast of well-drawn, unforgettable characters, as well as some lively secondary characters, is the driving force of the novel. Hay's sumptuous sense of place, redolent of author Jane Urquhart (but more droll), and her precision with character building, fuels the story with an electric and kinetic buzz. Her use of radio as an extended metaphor, her vast store of literary allusions, and her buoyant linguistic play are the ingredients that make for an intelligent and contoured novel. The back story of the proposed pipeline add dimension and depth to the tale.

During the summer, four of these characters agree to a six-week Arctic adventure by land and canoe to visit the place of John Hornby's exploration and death. The Barrens were the rugged, treeless, and desolate landscape of the interior Arctic. This would be a mighty challenge for the group, even in summer. The adventure is filled with drama and a supple examination of the human spirit. All four of the radio adventurers will be put to a supreme test of inner and outer strength and tenacity.

This is the first book I have read by Elizabeth Hay. I am a delighted admirer of her work now, and I look forward to reading her previous novels. Highly recommended for readers interested in solid and original characters, evocative depiction of landscape, and piercing themes of human survival. (less)

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Feb 02, 2011 Christie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favourite-books, book-club-reads

“Psychologically astute, richly rendered and deftly paced. It’s a pleasure from start to finish.” – Toronto Star

Canadian author Elizabeth Hay won the Giller Prize for her novel, Late Nights on Air. Obviously, you begin a book like this- one with a certain pedigree already attached - with a little trepidation. I mean, what if you hate it?

I am happy to report that this is a beautiful book.

Set in Yellowknife in 1975, the novel tells the story of the intersecting lives of Harry (a CBC radio station...more

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Jun 15, 2010 Jill rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: all-time-favorites

If a heart is torn apart in the Canadian arctic and no one hears it, did it really happen? Elizabeth Hay would answer a resounding “yes.”

All of her characters – a diverse group of wounded lost souls who work together in a small Yellowknife radio station in the mid-1970s – are aching. Harry – the curmudgeonly acting manager with the cauliflower ear – has returned from a gig in television with its tail between his legs. Dido ran from the only man she ever loved – her own father-in-law -- and quick...more If a heart is torn apart in the Canadian arctic and no one hears it, did it really happen? Elizabeth Hay would answer a resounding “yes.”

All of her characters – a diverse group of wounded lost souls who work together in a small Yellowknife radio station in the mid-1970s – are aching. Harry – the curmudgeonly acting manager with the cauliflower ear – has returned from a gig in television with its tail between his legs. Dido ran from the only man she ever loved – her own father-in-law -- and quickly connects with the station “bad boy”, Eddy. Eleanor fled from the memories of a husband who could not consummate their reunion. And Gwen, the youngest, who arrives at Yellowknife “subtle in her camouflage” with a buff-grey shirt with a pale brown collar and no adornment, looking to make a fresh start in an area in which fresh starts are legendary.

Within the course of this subtle and timeless novel, we get to meet these characters and more, as they reveal themselves like slowly blooming flowers. Events encroach on the town: a television station threatens to supplant the intimacy of the radio, a gas pipeline (based on the Mackenzie Valley pipeline project) is poised to disrupt the rhythm of the community and particularly its native people. The natural and charged quality of the narrative is slightly disrupted by these events and there’s a bare hint of the authorial voice.

But this author weaves her magic when she focuses on her characters, all of whom are connected to each other in intense and ultimately transformative ways. As summer turns to harsh winter, one of them muses, “Winter here does terrible things to people. You’ll find out.” And indeed, it does; people disappear or drift away or sometimes, forget to listen too closely. And what holds them together is the power of stories: Gwen’s creation of soundscapes and songs of longing during her late-night sound spot; others who present back stories that are so poignant and real you feel as if they’re coming from someone you know.

One of the strongest – and there are many – parts of this amazing book is when four of the characters embark on a journey into the rarely-travelled Arctic wilderness, where real-life Englishman John Hornby and a party of two starved to death in the Barrens in 1927. Each has his or her own compelling reason to go: “Ralph wanted to prove himself – prove that at sixty-one he was still youthful. And Eleanor had indicated that she and the Barrens might be a good spiritual fit. And Gwen had the young person’s all-consuming desire to see a place for the first time especially since it would complete a story that had captured her imagination as a child…” And Harry? “He was looking forward to a clean break from his old dissatisfactions, a summer that would help him forget his winter.”

The descriptions are exquisite: “They passed over the line into a world without walls, a land of rolling plains as exposed as the open sea. Their backs were sudden trees. Their hats were leaves the mosquitoes rested upon. Birds flew past their shoulders, like familiars. And at night, their quiet talk around the little bannock fire was similar to the voices of the trees that spooked the early Eskimos…”

Some characters will find redemption, others will face more questions. Some will make it, some will not. When Harry muses about the caribou, “He’d never known before that migration wasn’t one outbroken forward movement; it was sideways, backwards, forwards, a passage enlivened with indecision in the face of real and imagined danger”, he might have been speaking of himself and the others. The morning after I completed this book, I woke up yearning to reinhabit the world of these characters. No higher compliment can be paid.

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Jan 12, 2013 Ryan Murdock rated it 4 of 5 stars

Great works of fiction are often great works of place, where the landscape itself becomes a character in the narrative; it shapes events, and the characters are changed as they shift and respond to it. Elizabeth Hay has produced just such a novel. She writes with an eye that is sensitive to the subtle changes of the North, its muted colours, its breezes and winds, its light: “Not brilliant as in the Mediterranean […] Gentler. Almost autumnal. The hills didn’t have light on them, they were in lig...more

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Nov 15, 2012 Shonna Froebel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: canadian

I read this book for my bookclub (our first book) and enjoyed it, but not as much as I enjoyed Hay's "A Student of Weather".
I really enjoyed the descriptions of the north and what life was like in Yellowknife during the time period in which this book was set.
I found Gwen the most likeable character and enjoyed watching her grow in the book.
The book looks at the characters who work at a radio station in Yellowknife in the late 70s. Harry is an old hand at radio, who tried television and didn't do...more

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May 21, 2013 Allison rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: from-library, canadian, fiction

- meandering plot pace
- I read the version with the surreal green cover that the photo doesn't do justice
- I usually don't like ensemble casts or multiple narrators (a la Picoult), but I didn't mind it in this (perhaps because it's in third person and not first?)
- as a result: really nice gradual character development & description, but I read the book really slowly, too, and I kind of forgot some tidbits of character info
- I liked all the little anecdotes and everyday life moments
- the re...more

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May 09, 2013 Diana Sandberg rated it 2 of 5 stars

Disappointing. I much prefer her previous work, A Student of Weather, which I read some years ago.

Hay doesn't write swashbucklers; both books are quiet and rather slow. But where the first one caught me up with its characters, this one seemed more unfocused. I probably wouldn't have finished it, were it not for my experience of the first story, which kept me hoping. The wilderness trip that makes up the last portion of the book did hang together rather better.

One problem I had was that the POV...more

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Sep 09, 2010 Manussawee rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: recently-read, book-club

This book, unfortunately, was a meh for me. It got off on a bad note with me, taking me a while to get into the story. Unlike other recent books, it couldn't convince me to like it more.

The story took place in Yellowknife, northern Canada, and it revolved around four main characters: Harry, Dido, Gwen and Eleanor. Each character had some emptiness inside their soul and was looking for something and/or someone to fill the void. Dido chose not to find herself but rather to lose herself into an unh...more This book, unfortunately, was a meh for me. It got off on a bad note with me, taking me a while to get into the story. Unlike other recent books, it couldn't convince me to like it more.

The story took place in Yellowknife, northern Canada, and it revolved around four main characters: Harry, Dido, Gwen and Eleanor. Each character had some emptiness inside their soul and was looking for something and/or someone to fill the void. Dido chose not to find herself but rather to lose herself into an unhealthy, and perhaps even abusive, relationship with Eddy. Harry, Gwen and Eleanor found themselves canoeing the Thelon River.

In one of those paradoxes [Gwen] found hard to grasp, she felt more isolated in town than when she'd been on the Barrens with miles of emptiness around her... How was it possible to feel safer in the wilderness - as safe as she'd felt almost until the end - and how was it possible to feel lonelier now? (335)

We go on and on through the long months of our lives until we hit a sudden moment that stuns us (345)

For Eleanor: "She would always be living her life backwards, she realized, trying to regain something perfect that she'd lost (57)" She broke free of that whirlpool and took chance in the end. Harry and Gwen found each other, something that neither one of them were willing to admit or to see their relationship in that manner.

I guess the story was poetic enough, and I enjoyed the part when the four of them were canoeing. I almost felt peaceful as the characters felt at ease with themselves... and perhaps even came to terms with their own demons. But there was something missing for me. That oomph. Ironically, my feeling about the book is like how Hay had described Harry's feelings as he was sitting there listening to Daniel Moir talk about Dido: "Harry had been listening with interest, but no enjoyment... (332)"

A few passages I enjoyed:

Not surprising that the first [Harry] saw of his wife was her hair. Several long black hairs on the back of a chair. He'd picked them off distractedly, thinking they looked oriental, but they turned out to belong to the head of a dark and temperamental Scot (91)

If she had a nickel for every one of his smiles, she'd have ten cents (97)

"I mean to say," [Lorna] continued, "you put an onion next to butter and you get butter that tastes like onion (107)

"My old dad was something of a mystic," [Ralph] added. "Like the Celts, he believed we're made up of invisible currents. He used to say there are 'thin places' were we're closer to the unseen world." Harry: "Name a thin place." "The ocean. You stand next to the sea and you're in touch with all your longings and all your losses (122-123)

His face reminded her of an open book that's fall into a puddle (138)

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Aug 10, 2009 Zinta rated it 5 of 5 stars

You’ve heard it said, “hurts so good.” About the writing style of Elizabeth Hay, I can say: cuts so soft. Her words, her turn of phrase, her sweet sentence construction, it is as precise and expertly sculpted as with a sculptor’s chisel or a surgeon’s scalpel. Yet soft. The sharpest knife enters your flesh with hardly more than a red line—and finds its target. The heart. The reader’s mind. There are no ragged edges here.

The setting for this novel intrigued me right away. The book was a choice i...more

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Aug 09, 2011 Jennifer Karch Verzè added it

This Arctic book about life in Yellowknife in the 70's is full of references to the Radio and CBC, the pipeline (what happened anyway), great scenery, animals, the Dene people, aboriginal rights, canoeing and people working at the station. The people are somewhat complex and interacting with themselves form interesting characters, even though they in themselves are not so interesting. In the end, you can see that the time spent up North was helpful in making a future life, which was elsewhere. T...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Krista rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013, can-lit

I find myself slightly annoyed after reading Late Nights on Air. I've never been up to the Territories but have long been slightly fascinated by the North: I would love to go on one of those Polar Bear tours up in Churchill, or see the Northern Lights in Whitehorse, or witness the Caribou migration (as described here) outside of Yellowknife. I also know that I am too intimidated by the wilderness, and the wildlife in it, to ever attempt the epic canoe trip described in this book; in fact I'm too...more

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Feb 16, 2010 Tony rated it 5 of 5 stars

The setting: A radio station in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, 1975. The frozen Canadian north is on the verge of major changes: the arrival of television, oil and gas exploration, heightened tensions between natives and outsiders.
For anyone who has a romantic yearning to go to or return to the northern wilderness, this book evokes all the lonely beauty of the land (and sky). And the author is absolutely on target in her portrayal of the misfits, dreamers, emotional refugees and native peo...more

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Jun 18, 2011 Mrsgaskell rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 7-star, canadiana, bookcrossing

I found almost the first 200 pages or so of this book rather slow going but the Yellowknife setting kept me reading and ultimately my perseverance was rewarded. Overall, I decided that this was a very good book and parts were beautifully written. The book has an unusual cast of characters, perhaps exactly what one would expect to find among people who’ve escaped to the remote north, but the most interesting character seemed to be the North itself. The working of a radio station and the Mackenzie...more

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May 10, 2009 Kelly rated it 4 of 5 stars

It recalled my joy in presenting on community radio: "You get to be invisible...You control the interview, you ask the questions, you say when it's over. The theatre world is packed with same kind of people. Extroverted introverts."

"Silence is an interviewer's asset. All you have do is wait, and the person feels obliged to fill the vacuum with a serious answer".

And this comment from Teresa a traditional land owner: "If someone is sitting across from you and says, "I want your land," and you sa...more

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Aug 24, 2011 Zara rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: canadian-fiction

The first half of the book sets down the foundation of flawed characters who slowly woo you into the landscape of the North, its isolation, yet the closeness and intimacy of their township, and the realism and authenticity of their unique, yet easily recognizable personalities. They are rich and substantial, lacking stereotype. And their relationships with one another reveal their longings, their failings, and their complexities---especially in the forms of love.

The latter half of the novel beco...more

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Jan 17, 2012 Laura Mitchell rated it 3 of 5 stars

So this book took me an enormous amount of time to read. I found it extremely slow moving and the not so candid hints that where dispersed throughout regarding a future "undoing" of a character is what kept me reading.
The book is very descriptive of the surrounding area so if you like nature and someone explaining the colors and light hitting the water and trees then you will enjoy this book. The characters are all good characters but like I said, the story itself is very slow moving only to be...more

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Nov 23, 2011 Suzi rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is great for Canadians who are in radio. It rang nostalgic for me, referencing all of the outlying areas of my hometown, Edmonton, Alberta, making me feel cold and home and the same time. The canoe trip through the Barrens, just north of where I grew up, was effective in that my memories of wilderness were awakened... though the descriptions were often to lengthy for me and the detail seemed like a distracted tangent versus integral to the story being told. Is was like Hay fit her pass...more

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Sep 13, 2011 A.J. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: canada

This novel is deeply embedded in Canada's north. It conjured up the bleakness, isolation and danger of those distant lands in a convincing and fascinating way. I enjoyed every chapter.

I did find that there was a bit too much foreshadowing, which in the end seemed unjustified, but that's only a minor quibble. The background detail of disastrous Arctic explorations gave an interesting historical aspect, while the more recent impact of the 1970s Berger inquiry into the Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline...more

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Aug 11, 2012 Gary Lawrence rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: review-written

I loved this book. Varied, interesting "real" characters interact in a very different environment. The work place - a small town radio station. The location -in the far frozen North of Canada. The time - when oil and gas has been discovered and it is obvious that everything will be changed by the pipeline to come. Television is starting it's force-feeding process, replacing the interaction that regional radio had with it's isolated audience. Right from the start we are told there will be a trage...more

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Oct 01, 2010 Leah rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, library-book

This exquisite novel captured my heart; the author's craft is dazzling as she tells her tale. Small details make the scenes come alive, but are carefully chosen so they don't overwhelm the reader, only the relevant descriptions are included. Hay is gifted with leaving just enough touches of foreshadowing to tantalize the reader and keep her engaged and begging for more.
Reading this book was a joy and makes me yearn to go canoing north of the sixtieth parallel (even though the mosquitoes and flie...more

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Feb 09, 2011 Daniela rated it 3 of 5 stars

Although I quite liked this book, I do have some criticisms. The first two thirds of the book is very character driven. An interesting group of individuals working at a radio station in Yellowknife during the mid 70s’; Hay does a great job of portraying life in a northern Canadian community. You could almost feel the cold and loneliness. I loved the characters, but the plot seemed to meander. Two characters (Dido and Eddy) were so mysterious and had almost an “evil” feel to them and yet Hay didn...more

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About Elizabeth Hay

From Elizabeth Hay's web site:
"Elizabeth Hay was born in Owen Sound, Ontario, the daughter of a high school principal and a painter, and one of four children. When she was fifteen, a year in England opened up her world and set her on the path to becoming a writer. She attended the University of Toronto, then moved out west, and in 1974 went north to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. For th...more

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Quotes from Late Nights on Air

“She would always be living her life backwards, she realized, trying to regain something perfect that she'd lost.” — 9 people liked it

“You stand next to the sea and you're in touch with all your longings and all your losses.” — 8 people liked it

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1677996.Late_Nights_on_Air?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320425254l/1677996.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1677996.Late_Nights_on_Air?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay[/url]

Late Nights on Air

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