Snow Road Station

A Novel

By: Elizabeth Hay

Narrated by: Elizabeth Hay

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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.

"Joyous and lyrical." —Mary Lawson
"[In Snow Road Station,] Hay makes a case for the simplicity of pleasure." —The New Yorker

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 lifelong friendship between Lulu and Nan. As the two women contemplate growing old, they surrender certain hard-held dreams and confront the limits of the choices they’ve made and the messy feelings that kept them apart for decades.

Critic reviews

“At the center 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.’” —The New Yorker

“A moving novel about ageing and transformation. . . . Snow Road Station amazed me.” —Peterborough Examiner

“Joyous and lyrical, Snow Road Station is an ode to the North, in fact an ode to life itself, and all its possibilities.” —Mary Lawson, bestselling author of A Town Called Solace

“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.” —Ann-Marie MacDonald, author of the #1 bestselling Fayne

"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.” —The Literary Review of Canada

"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." —Winnipeg Free Press

Narration is terrible

I wish they had chosen a different narrator. Very monotonous and disengaging performance.
Im a quarter through it and not able to finish the story.
It has gotten such good reviews and I’m going to get the book right now to read it the ‚old fashioned‘ way.

Beautiful

Although this isn’t the best narration, the story is lyrical and immersive. It enveloped me in a cocoon of joy and peace, and being a small-town girl, now an older woman still in the city, I’m longing for the country. I’ll escape back to it ne of these days soon.
I got used to the author’s narration, and let this book take me in.