Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in Yellowknife, Northern Canada. There, 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 characters 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, 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, threatening to displace Native people from their land. 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 and laced with dark humour.

Prizes

Winner of Scotiabank Giller Prize 2007

A superb portrait of unremarkable lives, and a beautiful prose poem to vast open spaces' Joanna Kavenna, Spectator. * Spectator *
The kind of emotional intelligence that marks all great literature' Lesley McDowell, Scotsman. * Scotsman *
Funny, beautifully written and altogether wonderful - The Times. * The Times *
Hay exposes the beauty simmering in the heart of harsh settings with an evocative grace that brings to mind Annie Proulx - Washington Post. * Washington Post *
This novel has it all - tales of lust and lngings and hidden pasts, combined with utterly loveable characters..Hay's intelligent style makes this a summer must-read - Woman. * Woman *

ELIZABETH HAY is the author of the #1 bestseller Late Nights on Air (2008), which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her other works include Alone in the Classroom (2012) and His Whole Life (2015). In 2002, she received the prestigious Marian Engel Award, and for All Things Consoled she was the winner of the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Award for Non-fiction. She lives in Ottawa, Canada.