Snow Road Station: A Novel Audiobook

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.

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"“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.