Elizabeth Hay has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.7★ across 561 ratings. The most-rated is Helter Skelter.
Helter Skelter
Summary
Prosecuting attorney in the Manson trial Vincent Bugliosi held a unique insider's position in one of the most baffling and horrifying cases of the 20th century: the cold-blooded Tate-LaBianca murders carried out by Charles Manson and four of his followers. What motivated Manson in his seemingly mindless selection of victims, and what was his hold over the young women who obeyed his orders? Now available for the first time in unabridged audio, the gripping story of this famous and haunting crime is brought to life by acclaimed narrator Scott Brick.
©1974 Curt Gentry and Vincent Bugliosi, Afterword 1994 by Vincent Bugliosi (P)2011 Audible, Inc.
All Things Consoled
Summary
From Elizabeth Hay, one of Canada's most beloved novelists, comes a startling and beautiful memoir about the drama of her parents' end and the longer drama of being their daughter.
Winner of the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.
Jean and Gordon Hay were a colorful, formidable pair. Jean, a late-blooming artist with a marvelous sense of humor, was superlatively frugal; nothing got wasted, not even maggoty soup. Gordon was a proud and ambitious schoolteacher with a terrifying temper, a deep streak of melancholy, and a devotion to flowers, cars, words, and his wife.
As old age collides with the tragedy of living too long, these once ferociously independent parents become increasingly dependent on Lizzie, the so-called difficult child. By looking after them in their final decline, she hopes to prove that she can be a good daughter after all.
In this courageous memoir, written with tough-minded candor, tenderness, and wit, Elizabeth Hay lays bare the exquisite agony of a family's dynamics - entrenched favoritism, sibling rivalries, grievances that last for decades, genuine admiration, and enduring love. In the end, she reaches a more complete understanding of the most unforgettable characters she will ever know, the vivid giants in her life who were her parents.
©2018 Elizabeth Hay (P)2018 McClelland & Stewart
Late Nights on Air
Summary
The eagerly anticipated novel from the best-selling author of A Student of Weather and Garbo Laughs. Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined. Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric, utterly loveable 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 form the center. One summer, on a canoe trip the four of them make into the Arctic wilderness (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who, along with his small party, 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 the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, which threatens to displace Native people from their land. Elizabeth Hay has been compared to Annie Proulx, Alice Hoffman, and Isabel Allende, yet she is uniquely herself. With unforgettable characters and vividly evoked settings in this new novel, Hay brings to bear her skewering intelligence into the frailties of the human heart and her ability to tell a spellbinding story. Laced with dark humor and in gorgeous prose, Late Nights on Air is Hay’s most seductive and accomplished novel, yet. "On the shortest night of the year, a golden evening without end, Dido climbed the wooden steps to Pilot’s Monument on top of the great Rock that formed the heart of old Yellowknife. In the Netherlands the light was long and gradual too, but more meadowy, more watery, or else hazier, depending on where you were.... Here, it was subarctic desert, virtually unpopulated, and the light was uniformly clear. On the road below, a small man in a black beret was bending over his tripod just as her father used to bend over his tape recorder. Her father’s voice had become the wallpaper inside her skull, he’d made a home for himself there as improvised and unexpected as these little houses on the side of the Rock - houses with histories of instability, of changing from gambling den to barber shop to sheet metal shop to private home, and of being moved from one part of town to another since they had no foundations." - From Late Nights On Air
©2009 Elizabeth Hay (P)2018 McClelland & Stewart
Garbo Laughs
Summary
A Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year A Quill & Quire Top Five Canadian Fiction Book of the Year A Maclean's Top Ten Book of the Year Elizabeth Hay's runaway national best seller is a funny, sad-eyed, deliciously entertaining novel about a woman caught in a tug of war between real life and the films of the past. Inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child, Harriet Browning forms a Friday-night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named after Dinah Shore. Into this idiosyncratic world, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood: Harriet's Aunt Leah, the jaded widow of a screenwriter blacklisted in the 1950s, and her sardonic, often overbearing stepson, Jack. They bring harsh reality and illuminate the pull of family and friendship, the sting of infidelity and revenge, the shock of illness and sudden loss. Poignant, brilliant, and delightfully droll, Garbo Laughs reveals how the dramas of everyday life are sometimes the most astonishing of all.
©2017 Elizabeth Hay (P)2017 Emblem Editions
Small Change
Summary
These 20 superbly crafted linked stories navigate the difficult realm of friendship, charting its beginnings and ends, its intimacies and betrayals, its joys and humiliations. A mother learns something of the nature of love from watching her young daughter as she falls in and out of favor with a neighborhood girl. An intricate story of two women reveals a friendship held together by the steely bonds of passivity. A chance sighting in a library prompts a woman to recall the "unconsummated courtship" she was drawn into by a male colleague. With trenchant insight, uncommon honesty, and dark humor, Elizabeth Hay probes the precarious bonds that exist between friends. The result is an emotionally raw and provocative collection of stories that will resonate with listeners long after they finish.
©2018 Elizabeth Hay (P)2018 Emblem Editions
His Whole Life
Summary
Starting with something as simple as a boy who wants a dog, His Whole Life takes us into a richly intimate world where everything that matters is at risk: family, nature, country, home. At the outset, 10-year-old Jim and his Canadian mother and American father are on a journey from New York City to a lake in eastern Ontario during the last hot days of August. What unfolds is an enveloping story that spans a few pivotal years of Jim's youth and sets out competing claims on everyone's love: for Canada over New York; for a mother over a father; a friend over a husband; one son over another. With her trademark honesty, wisdom, vivid sense of place, and nuanced characters, Hay deftly charts the deepening bond between mother and son even as the family threatens to come apart. Set in the mid-1990s, when Quebec was on the verge of leaving Canada, this captivating novel is an unconventional coming-of-age story as only Elizabeth Hay could tell it. With grace and power, she explores the mystery of how members of a family can hurt each other so deeply, and remember those hurts in such detail, yet find openings that shock them with love and forgiveness. This is vintage Elizabeth Hay at the height of her powers. Finalist 2015 - Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
©2015 Elizabeth Hay (P)2018 Emblem Editions