Late Nights on Air

I read this book as part of the Book Awards II Challenge. Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay, won the 2007 Giller Prize.

Here’s the blurb:

Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, 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, utterly loveable characters, all transplants from elsewhere, 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 (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who, along with his small party, starved to death in the barrens in 1927), 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, which threatens to displace Native people from their land.

It was one of those books that I started reading not really knowing what to expect. But I was sucked right in at the beginning. I read the book in a few days, and I enjoyed it, but I really didn't get anything in particular from the book.

I thought the characters were interesting, I didn't care for Dido, I liked Harry, but my favorite was Gwen. But for me the scene stealer was the setting. I found myself more interested in the physical surroundings than what was going on with the characters.

Late Nights On Air by Elizabeth Hay (3/5) General Fiction; Published: McClelland & Stewart (2007); New Author; Canadian Author; Giller Prize Winner (2007); 100 + Reading Challenge (61); Book Awards II Challenge (3); Library book;