Starting with something as simple as a boy who wants a dog, award-winning novelist Elizabeth Hay's His Whole Life transports readers to an emotionally rich landscape populated by unforgettable characters, yet overshadowed by a sense of loss. At the outset, ten-year-old Jim and his Canadian mother and American father are on a journey from New York City to a beautiful lake in eastern Ontario during the last hot days of August. Over the next few pivotal years of Jim's youth, the novel moves from city to country, summer to winter, well-being to illness, as it charts the deepening bond between mother and son, even as their small family starts to fall to pieces. Set in the mid-1990s, when Quebec was on the verge of seceding from Canada, this captivating novel is an unconventional coming-of-age story that draws readers in with its warmth, wisdom, its vivid sense of place, its searching honesty, and nuanced portrait of the lives of a family and those closest to it. Writing at the height of her powers, the award-winning Elizabeth Hay explores the mystery of how family members can wound each other so deeply, and remember those hurts in such detail, yet find surprising ways to make room for love, and even forgiveness.

It’s 1975 when beautiful Dido Paris arrives at the radio station in Yellowknife, a frontier town in the Canadian north. She disarms hard-bitten broadcaster Harry Boyd and electrifies the station, setting into motion rivalries both professional and sexual.As the drama at the station unfolds, a proposed gas pipeline threatens to rip open the land and inspires many people to find their voices for the first time.This is the moment before television conquers the north’s attention, when the fate of the Arctic hangs in the balance.After the snow melts, members of the radio station take a long canoe trip into the Barrens, a mysterious landscape of lingering ice and infinite light that exposes them to all the dangers of the ever-changing air.Spare, witty, and dynamically charged, this compelling tale embodies the power of a place and of the human voice to generate love and haunt the memory.

Product Description: In one of the earliest published works by the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner, Elizabeth Hay, in her graceful, poetic style, 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 the identity of Canadians and how we live in the wider world...read more

Harriet Browning becomes enmeshed in the old movies that she was deprived of as a child and views over and over again, until she no longer fits into the real world, until the arrival of two Hollywood refugees, the widow of a famous screenwriter and her movie-expert stepson, who bring her face to face with real life. By the author of A Student of Weather. Reprint.

Product Description: Discusses the novel, A Student of Weather.

A series of interconnected short stories explores the intimacies, betrayals, origins and evolution, joys, and tragedies of friendship between women. By the author of A Student of Weather. Original. 25,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

Product Description: 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...read more