In one of the earliest published works by the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner, Elizabeth Hay, in her graceful, poetic style, collects a series of reflections on life, identity, history, and love, drifting through her many homes — Yellowknife, Mexico City, Toronto, and New York City — to consider the identity of Canadians and how we live in the wider world.

With every place she lives, Hay questions the idea of being Canadian that it means, who we are, how do we act, how do we live and compares it to the world around her in stunning detail, drawing the disparate locations together by their connection to the history of the early Canadian fur trade and our hearty adoration of snow.

Using her own life and experiences of working in radio, raising a daughter, and finding her place in the world, Hay informs and expands the history she explores by including her own. She writes of the heart of a country, the history of a people that live on the brink of identity, the smallest slip and we enter an entirely different world.

Blending memoir, biography, and history in a provocative intensity, Hay’s style and talent shines through in this early work, proving her well on the road to her long, and lustrous career. The Only Snow in Havana is an accomplished work, an early, compelling document of one of Canada’s finest writers.