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  • Snow Road Station

  • A Novel
  • Written by: Elizabeth Hay
  • Narrated by: Elizabeth Hay
  • Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (11 ratings)

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Snow Road Station cover art

Snow Road Station

Written by: Elizabeth Hay
Narrated by: Elizabeth Hay
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Publisher's Summary

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 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.
©2023 Elizabeth Hay (P)2023 Knopf Canada

What the critics say

“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

What listeners say about Snow Road Station

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

A late coming of age

How lovely to listen to Elizabeth Hay’s peaceful, thoughtful, timbered voice take Loulou through the sharp sadness of facing retirement to the deep joy of finally having the time to truly enjoy family and friends. For those of us who have barrelled madly and blindly along in life, focused on work work work, it is so satisfying to read about someone bravely putting on the brakes and coming back to the real beauty of nature, children and comfortable love. There are gorgeous descriptions of the sugar maple bush, and delightful phrasing of everyday moments that I want to read over and over again, just to have a smile. Take your time with this book to receive all the gifts it has to give.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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Quite simply astonishing

I also purchased the hardcover of this book because I wanted to enjoy the language in written form as well as spoken. This book spoke directly to my heart. The intimate and complex experiences of these women who are easy to love, because the author has shown them in their full, resilient, human form. Elizabeth Hay is so powerful
and graceful, the way she gets to the root of the story. Oh it is so good. The book is about many things, but especially about long term female friendship and its pillar position within the female experience.

I enjoyed the Beckett through-line, holding him to account but also acknowledging his intentions. I really loved the way the landscape held such a memorable place in the story, especially the maple tree motif, and the snow.

Elizabeth Hay writes with so much wisdom and delicacy, she quietly encourages her characters blossom with all the might they can muster. Xox

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The best of author-read novels

If you love Elizabeth Hay, enjoy. This book sang to me as her work often does; hearing it in her voice gave it a warmth and simple vulnerable immediacy that was hypnotic. Absolutely captures the sense of the Lanark highlands, much like a lot of Eastern Ontario as the landscape settles into your heart.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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Pretty enough.

Here's a different take on the classic 'you can go home again' theme. I found large sections were just incredibly boring, and the author/narrator's hushed reverent voice was sleep-inducing. I wish I had loaned it from the public library instead of spending $15 on it. I'll never listen to it again.

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Predictable and sleep inducing !

I found the storyline banal and predictable from the outset. The tone of the author’s narration was totally soporific! Elizabeth Hay is no Alice Munro!

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