Snow Road Station

Author/Guide: Elizabeth Hay

Why a Booktrail?

2008: Snow Road Station – a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario.

ISBN: 978-1035418732
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

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 to Snow Road Station – a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario.

Lulu Blake, sexy and seemingly unfooled, is now in her sixties. Out of work, humiliated, she enters the last act of her life wondering what she can make of her diminished self. She believes she is through with theatre and drama – but drama is not through with her.

At the centre of the novel is the relationship between Lulu and her lifelong friend Nan. As the two women contemplate growing older, they surrender certain hard-held dreams and confront the limits of the choices they have made.

Locations

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Travel Guide

Snow Road station

The author says that although the novel is fictional, the location Snow Road Station is very real. A tiny dot on the map but it’s there!

There are many fascinating locations in the book. Snow Road has a very interesting history in real life and in the novel. Other towns around in the Lanark area are quaint and small – Almonte, Middleville and Hopetown to name but a few. There is also a nice mention of Stump Lake where a character drives to.

The author says:

“I’ve been in love with the name “Snow Road Station” for decades. It’s a real village in eastern Ontario, not far from where we have our family cabin. The name is evocative, even poetic, with its three-part movement from snow to road to station—an arrival, a departure, a long wait—a place of rest, a stoppage, yet a road. That movement is mirrored in the novel, for not only did the name give me the book’s title, it gave me its three-part structure.”