Another day, another new reviewer for Bookgeeks – so please welcome Nicola Currie!

Set in the wild frigid climes of a Canadian North on the cusp of industrial invasion, Late Nights on Air is a novel about unavoidable change, nostalgic memory and emotion rooted in time and place.

Beginning in the small northern town of Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, the story takes place over three notably different acts, knitted together by the lives, motivations and reminiscences of a group of incidental friends.

CFYK, the town radio station, is where these friends first encounter one another, when  Harry, a washed-up television presenter with no option but to return to the small station where he began his career, hears the enigmatic voice of the beautiful, vital Dido over the airwaves, and falls in love at first sound. Tensions arise and hearts break, however, as new-girl Gwen and inured receptionist Eleanor fall into their paths, alive with new emotions and old wounds.

Don’t let this first act fool you. Romance is a peripheral issue of the novel, which is never overly soppy or seductive, used to express the main theme of transience. The character of Dido almost personifies temporality. First fleeing a failed marriage, she later runs away from Yellowknife, signifying the transitory nature of beauty and life.

Akin in this sense to Walter Scott’s Waverley, this is the story of a journey into a fragile world and time on the edge of a cultural shift. From the prospect of a gas pipeline through the lands of the native Dene people, to a new television station that threatens the future of CFYK, Yellowknife and the lives of its inhabitants cannot remain the same for long.

Like Scott’s magical, fading Scotland, Hay’s North is one of folklore and legend, with its regular accounts of histories and old adventures. Indeed, even the characters and events of the story unfolding are kept at a distance from the reader, Hay’s smattered hints of future plot points highlighting the inevitability of loss and change, as if to suggest that the characters we are discovering are already ghosts.

The central activity of the novel is an epic journey into the frozen tundra that changes the lives of the adventurers forever. Fuelled by new epiphanies and an awareness of life’s ephemerality, each returns from the North with a new direction and an awareness that life will never be the same.

Ultimately, Late Nights on Air poignantly explores the brevity of existence. An elegy to the tragic beauty of the evanescent - to love lost, to sights seen, to life faded to myth - it essentially suggests that each moment should be cherished, before it is lost forever.

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