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. In the mid 1970s in the northern Canadian town of Yellowkinfe 6 people have pivot points in their lives, two leaving the four others variously haunted who take a trip echoing John Hornbys. 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. 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.

Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric characters who form an unlikely group at the station. Late Nights on Air : A Novel Paperback Elizabeth Hay Genre: Biography & Autobiography, Travel, Fiction Topic: Special Interest / Adventure, Personal Memoirs. 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. LATE NIGHTS ON AIR is a literary gem, written from an omniscient point-of-view with love and care for its several main characters, who have all been turned and polished so that all of their facets and flaws are revealed under the light of careful and appreciative reading.

Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in Yellowknife, Northern Canada.

Late nights on air