Elizabeth Hay's latest novel Snow Road Station takes characters from her previous work and leads a new story about a failed actor's search for connection in a small Ontario town.

Hay is a former radio broadcaster and Giller Prize-winning author of the 2007 novel Late Nights on Air. Her memoir All Things Consoled won the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize.

Snow Road Station is Hay's return to fiction which follows the journey of Lulu Blake, an actor in her sixties who discovers the bonds of female friendship and her own desires amidst the backdrop of a wintery hamlet.

Snow Road Station is on the CBC Books summer reading list.

Hay spoke to Shelagh Rogers about Snow Road Station.

Snow Road Station is a real place. It's an Ontario hamlet, no theatre reference intended. Would you describe it for us?

It's a place I've known for about 50 years. We've had a small family cabin there and it's just a little dot on the Ontario map. It's about an hour and a bit southwest of Ottawa and it's a wild, wonderful country. It's not been civilized by fancy cottages. Not so far anyway, so it's very much as it was when I first saw it at the age of 19.

It brings her to a very vulnerable point in her life. She's 62. She's landed this terrific role because somebody else dropped out. But it's a dream come true and then the complications really begin. One of those complications is that it's such a desperately hard part. She has a limited time to learn it, she manages the first few performances and then starts to unravel and feels herself unravel.

Well, it's fairly close to my own except I'm older than Lulu. I'm even older than you, Shelagh!

The character of a sexy older woman, that's Lulu. She's an independent, sexy, single, childless woman who's made her way through life very independently. The character of the sexy older woman is full of untapped potential for romance, drama and trouble. So she has kind of a performer's mentality, which I think involves a fair bit of self belief and an agonizing amount of self doubt.

There's tension inside her as well as the tension of her situation. There's also her wonderful physical confidence. She really is ready and open for sexual love and I just was intrigued by this and wanted to spend more time with her and see how it ended up.

Well, that's a long conversation that starts early in the book between Lulu, Nan and Lulu's niece. The three of them are having this middle of the night conversation about what it is that makes a man sexy and then they draw young Jim into the conversation. He's Nan's 23 year old son. So the conversation expands and one of the things that the women agree on is that it's the look in a man's eyes. One of the things that Jim introduces is that it's actually somebody who's comfortable with themselves, somebody who doesn't try too hard and somebody who's relaxed.

It's a conversation about attraction and then throughout the book, it widens because although they're talking about what makes a person magnetic, there's always this question of what makes a place magnetic. Nan confesses and admits happily that she's in love with the place, and the place she's in love with is Snow Road Station. What makes it magnetic? Well, there's this tremendous physical draw that she feels in this remote part of backwoods Ontario that satisfies her deeply and she wants to be there and with it — as you might want to be there and with a person who attracts you.

The main way it reverberates is that she thinks Nan could have protected her and Nan failed to protect her by not telling her more about her own life and her relationship with the predator, who in fact is Nan's ex-husband. At the heart of the book is not just Lulu and her future but that friendship she has with Nan, a long time friendship despite periods when they've been out of touch, that started in childhood. So there's a huge bond that in meeting again, they reestablish that bond and then the attack throws that bond into question as well as Lulu's sense of herself.

That deep friendship between Nan and Lulu, which neither of them wants to lose. But it's one of those cases where you think you're a very close friend and then something happens to make you doubt the intimacy but that's part of the story.

I love that whole process of making maple syrup the old way when it's not completely mechanized. In this part of the world it was a spring or a winter that was bountiful with snow and I wanted all of that snow in the book. Then I wanted Lulu, when she retreats from her failure, her disaster in the play, to be brought into a different kind of life. That different kind of life is the hard work of making maple syrup. So part of what enables Lulu to find her feet again is this careful physical work which involves being outside in that wonderful world of the sugar bush and making something by hand.

I think it's sanity-producing.