Winner of the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Late Nights on Air is based in part on bestselling Canadian writer Hay's experience as a CBC Radio journalist. Hay (A Student of Weather; Garbo Laughs) calls the novel, set at a radio station in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, a book "about the romance of the disembodied voice.”
“After being fired from his latest television job, a disgraced Harry Boyd returns to his radio roots in the northern Canadian town of Yellowknife as the manager of a station no one listens to, and finds himself at the center of the station's unlikely social scene. New anchor Dido Paris, both renowned and mocked for her Dutch accent, fled an affair with her husband's father, only to be torn between Harry and another man. Wild child Gwen came to learn radio production, but under Harry's tutelage finds herself the guardian of the late-night shift. And lonely Eleanor wonders if it's time to move south just as she meets an unlikely suitor. While the station members wait for Yellowknife to get its first television station and the crew embarks on a life-changing canoe expedition, the city is divided over a proposal to build a pipeline that would cut across Native lands, bringing modernization and a flood of workers, equipment and money into sacred territory. Hay's crystalline prose, keen details and sharp dialogue sculpt the isolated, hardy residents of Yellowknife, who provide a convincing backdrop as the main cast tromps through the existential woods.” –Publishers Weekly
“Invites comparison with work by Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood.” –Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Elegiac...exquisite.... Hay creates enormous spaces with few words, and makes the reader party to the journey, listening, marveling, breathing, fearing.” –Globe and Mail (Toronto)
