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From the Giller Prize-winning author comes a novel, witty and wise, about thwarted ambition, unrealized dreams, the enduring bonds of female friendship, and love’s capacity to surprise us at any age.
In the winter of 2008, as snow falls without interruption, an actor in a Beckett play blanks on her lines. Fleeing the theatre, she beats a retreat into her past and arrives at Snow Road Station, a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario.
The actor is Lulu Blake, in her sixties now, a sexy, seemingly unfooled woman well-versed in taking risks. Out of work, humiliated, she enters the last act of her life wondering what she can make of her diminished self. In Snow Road Station she decides she is through with drama–but drama, it turns out, isn’t through with her. She thinks she wants peace. It turns out she wants more.
Looming in the background is that autumn’s global financial meltdown, while in the foreground family and friends animate a round of weddings, sap harvests, love affairs, and personal turmoil. At the centre of it all is the friendship between Lulu and Nan. As the two women contemplate growing old, they surrender certain long-held dreams and confront the limits of the choices they’ve made and the messy feelings that kept them apart for decades.
In the winter of 2008, as snow falls without interruption, an actor in a Beckett play blanks on her lines. Fleeing the theatre, she beats a retreat into her past and arrives at Snow Road Station, a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario.
The actor is Lulu Blake, in her sixties now, a sexy, seemingly unfooled woman well-versed in taking risks. Out of work, humiliated, she enters the last act of her life wondering what she can make of her diminished self. In Snow Road Station she decides she is through with drama–but drama, it turns out, isn’t through with her. She thinks she wants peace. It turns out she wants more.
Looming in the background is that autumn’s global financial meltdown, while in the foreground family and friends animate a round of weddings, sap harvests, love affairs, and personal turmoil. At the centre of it all is the friendship between Lulu and Nan. As the two women contemplate growing old, they surrender certain long-held dreams and confront the limits of the choices they’ve made and the messy feelings that kept them apart for decades.
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Reviews
Joyous and lyrical, Snow Road Station is an ode to the North, in fact an ode to life itself, and all its possibilities
Snow Road Station is an exquisitely etched coming-of-middle-age story. With a touch by turns subtle and sensual, Elizabeth Hay explores the surprising differences--and crucial overlaps--between what we think makes us happy, and what actually does. Along the way, we are drawn imperceptibly into intimacy with characters who reckon with the past in order to remake their own--and perhaps the reader's--notions of what family is.
At the centre of this sensitive novel, set in Ontario in 2008, is Lulu, a middle-aged actress who has returned to the hamlet of her youth for her nephew's wedding. . . . Hay makes a case for the simplicity of pleasure: 'All you have to do," Lulu thinks, "is put yourself in the way of beauty, put yourself into the incredible swing of it
A moving novel about ageing and transformation. . . . Snow Road Station amazed me
Like Elizabeth Strout with Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton, Hay has created a fictional world to which she returns, to great effect. Both His Whole Life and Snow Road Station stand on their own, but there's real pleasure in reading them consecutively and re-encountering the characters at later stages of their lives--and in different lights.
In this charming, engaging and eloquent novel, Lulu takes centre stage . . . . Like all of Hay's previous novels, Snow Road Station is a gift to be cherished.