Elizabeth Hay

A Student of Weather Elizabeth Hay First edition

In the Prairie Dust Bowl of the 1930s, a stranger walks out of a storm and forever alters the lives of two sisters, the strange and intense Norma-Joyce and the beautiful Lucinda. Their rivalry for Maurice Dove, a student studying weather on the Prairies, sets the stage for a narrative spanning more than thirty years, beginning in Saskatchewan and moving, in the decades following the war, to Ottawa and New York City. Although Norma-Joyce is only a child when Maurice Dove drops into her life, she develops a fixation for him that lasts a lifetime. Hay's writing is spare yet richly textured, dark and erotic. The physical and emotional landscapes she portrays evoke surprises, tragic and comic, and teach us about the lasting imprint of first love.