Joanna Kavenna

Late Nights on Air comes daubed with the usual eulogies, yet this is one book that truly merits the ecstatic blurb and more besides. It is Elizabeth Hay’s third novel, after A Student of Weather (2000) and Garbo Laughs (2003), both of which have been lauded in her native Canada and, to a lesser degree, beyond. Late Nights on Air is set largely in the mid-Seventies, in Yellowknife, the main town of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Harry Boyd, edging into his forties, has failed elsewhere, and has come to lick his wounds at the local radio station where his career began.

There are a lot of travel writers these days setting off ‘in the footsteps of’ someone else, gathering clues and arguing with ghosts. This is partly pragmatism: there are so few untouched trails around that you might as well make a virtue of necessity, lend your narrative some historical backbone and a point of comparison. It means that as you stare across at an interlaced network of concrete motorways and slab-like apartment blocks, you can contrast the contemporary carnage with the three wooden huts your predecessor observed, or discern the vestiges of the past among the urban clutter. Yet at times the genre can flag: the footsteps simply aren’t compelling, the structure is creaky, the premise ultimately dubious.

John Gimlette is a writer of vivid comical prose, whose first travel book appeared under the title At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. For his second, he has followed an ancestral trail, padding along in the footprints of his great-grandfather, Eliot Curwen. Curwen, a doctor, set off for Newfoundland and Labrador in 1893, ‘lands generally supposed to have been gnawed away by poverty and cold’. Gimlette finds a ‘theatre of fish’, where the locals speak a curious dialect, riddled with surviving elements from ‘Old English, Middle English, bad English, both classical and bog Irish, Portuguese, Micmac, Basque, Breton and babble’. Newfound- land, according to Gimlette, is a land neither entirely North American nor entirely European, a wild hinterland.