Late Night on the Air, Elizabeth Hay

This Canadian novel is one I picked up on our walk around Lake Superior.  It is about a radio station in far off Yellowknife where the air ways play to the tundra and the scattered populations of white and native.  It is a place where voices become attached to a complex group of people who are far from the fame of media and pulled together around the need to broadcast.

They are a diverse group, each journey is independent, and their stories interact with one another, yet each character is richly written to avoid the normal clichés.  There is the changing darkness to light and brief summer to winter, and modern pressures on ancient communities (a pipeline). 

Each person filters the place through their personal life story and they are all transients who can only touch on the truth of Yellowknife.  There is the lure of the arctic explorer as the characters are drawn in to the true life story of a group that died trying to overwinter away from civilization and there is the canoe trip that bares their emotions and their minds in a raw and beautiful nature.

FROM ELIZABETH HAYS WEBSITE
About the book

Harry Boyd, a world-weary, washed-up television broadcaster, has returned to a small radio station in the remote reaches of the Canadian North. There, in the golden summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real Dido Paris is even more than he imagined.

Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric and fascinating characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, are at the heart of the novel.

Then one summer, four of them embark upon a long canoe trip into the Barrens, a mysterious landscape of lingering ice and almost continuous light. In that wild and dynamic arctic setting (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who starved to death in the Barrens in 1927), they find the balance of love shifting, much as the balance of power in the North is being changed by a proposed gas pipeline that threatens to displace Native people from their land.