Red Dog, Red Dog Paperback by Patrick Lane

Product Details

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart (2009-08-04)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 352 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780771046322
• Item Weight: 283.5 grams
• Dimensions: 7.93 x 5.2 x 0.94 cm

A National Bestseller, Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year, and one of the most powerful, gripping works of fiction to come out of Canada.

An epic novel of unrequited dreams and forestalled lives, Red Dog, Red Dog is set in the mid-1950s, in a small town in the interior of B.C. in the unnamed Okanagan Valley. The novel focuses on the Stark family, centring on brothers Eddy and Tom, who are bound together by family loyalty and inarticulate love.

There is Tom and Eddy’s father, Elmer Stark, a violent man with a troubled past, and Lillian, who married as a girl to escape life on the farm with her widowed mother, and now retreats into her own isolation. Unrepentant, bitter, older brother Eddy speeds freely along, his desperate path fuelled by drugs and weapons, while Tom, a loner, attempts to conceal their secrets and protect what remains of the family. Eventually, an unspeakable crime causes him to come face to face with something traumatic that has lain hidden in him since he was a boy. Narrated in part by one of the dead infant daughters Elmer has buried, the story unfolds gradually, as it weaves in family stories that reach back to the depression days and the harsh life of settlers in the 1880s West.

This is also a novel about a small community of people, about complicated loyalties, about betrayals and shifts of power. Filled with moments of harrowing violence and breathtaking description, of shattering truths and deep humanity, Red Dog, Red Dog is about the legacies of the past and the possibilities of forgiveness and redemption. With this astonishing novel, one of Canada’s best poets propels himself into the forefront of our finest novelists.

About the Author

PATRICK LANE was one of Canada's pre-eminent poets and winner of numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence, and three National Magazine Awards. His distinguished career spanned more than fifty years. He wrote twenty-five volumes of poetry, as well as award-winning books of fiction and non-fiction including Red Dog, Red Dog; There Is a Season; and Deep River Night.

He lived and travelled extensively around the world and his work has been published in a number of countries. He was writer in residence and teacher at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and the University of Toronto in Ontario. Patrick Lane most recently lived near Victoria, BC, with his wife, the poet Lorna Crozier. He died in 2019.