Late Nights on Air: A Novel

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Alone in the Classroom

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In a small prairie school in 1929, Connie Flood helps a backward student, Michael Graves, learn how to read. Observing them and darkening their lives is the principal, Parley Burns, whose strange behaviour 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.

Following her award-winning, #1 bestselling Late Nights on Air, Alone in the Classroom is Elizabeth Hay’s most intricate, compelling, and seductive novel yet

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Small Change

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An award-winning collection of linked stories about women and friendship by the acclaimed author of A Student of Weather.. Small Change is a superbly crafted collection of linked stories that navigate the difficult realm of friendship, charting its beginnings and endings, 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 favor with a neighborhood girl. An intricate story of two women reveals a friendship held together by the steely bonds of passivity.With trenchant insight, uncommon honesty, and dark humor, 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. Small Change was a finalist for the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Award, and the Rogers Communication Writer's Trust Fiction Prize.

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A Student of Weather

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Norma Joyce is young, dark and homely but tough as prairie grass; Lucinda is fair and dutiful, and stands between Norma and the bitter anger of their father. In the drought-ravaged prairies of 1930s Saskatchewan, two sisters fall in love with the same man in a saga of unrequited love.

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Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York

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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.

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Garbo Laughs

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A novel about love, set in Ottawa in the 1990s, it is the quixotic tale of tall, thin Harriet Browning, inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child. Bent on seeing everything she has missed, she rapidly becomes so saturated with old movies, seen repeatedly and swallowed whole, that she no longer fits into this world. What hope does real love have when movie love, in all its brief intensity, is an easy option?

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