A Student of Weather

From some accidents of love and weather we never quite recover. At the worst of the Prairie dust bowl of the 1930s, a young man appears out of a blizzard and forever alters the lives of two sisters. There is the beautiful, fastidious Lucinda, and the tricky and tenacious Norma Joyce, at first a strange, self-possessed child, later a woman who learns something of self-forgiveness and of the redemptive nature of art. Their rivalry sets the stage for all that follows in a narrative spanning over thirty years, beginning in Saskatchewan and moving, in the decades following the war, to Ottawa and New York City. Disarming, vividly told, unforgettable, this is a story about the mistakes we make that never go away, about how the things we want to keep vanish and the things we want to lose return to haunt us.

Elizabeth Hay is the author of two highly acclaimed, bestselling novels. Her first novel, A Student of Weather (2000), won the CAA MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction and the TORGI Award, and was a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Ottawa Book Award, and the Pearson Canada Reader’s Choice Award at The Word on the Street. Her most recent novel, Garbo Laughs (2003), won the Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. She is also the author of Crossing the Snow Line (stories, 1989); The Only Snow in Havana (non-fiction, 1992); Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (non-fiction, 1993), and Small Change (stories, 1997), which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her stories have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Anthology, and The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women, edited by Rosemary Sullivan. She has won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction and a Western Magazine Award for Fiction. In 2002, she received the prestigious Marian Engel Award.

Elizabeth Hay lives in Ottawa.