Red Dog, Red Dog

Lane's exquisite craftsmanship is on display...particularly his unerring instinct for images that wound and enlighten in equal measure

Globe and Mail

A rich variant on Cormac McCarthy's biblically cadenced western noir and Flannery O'Connor's Southern gothic.

Montreal Gazette

Faulkneresque.

Toronto Star

Acclaimed Canadian poet Patrick Lane has struck out in a new direction, completing his debut novel...I was hugely excited by the prospect, and the novel - an uncompromising family story set in the 1950s - does not disappoint

Alex Clark

scenes are finely drawn and convincing.

Scottish Sunday Herald

The tale, with Tom and Eddy at its heart, is one of loathing, neglect, abuse and brutality, with little redemption except the powerful, vivid quality of the writing itself...Lane is talented and five decades as a poet are evident in his prose: rich and evocative, yet always precise.

Observer

Set in 1958, with flashbacks to the Depression and settler eras, this impressive tale of redneck life in British Columbia exudes suffering and menace.

Adrian Turpin, Financial Times

the writing is beautiful.

Kate Saunders, The Times

[a] formidable debut.

Catherine Taylor, Guardian

Lane is undeniably an accomplished writer...and his achievement here is his evocation of a forbidding landscape as the element in which these embittered characters have their being...It is fitting that Lane's oracular first novel ends not conclusively but with a hint of the continuation of the kind of story it has told so well

TLS

Occasionally a novel comes out of nowhere and blows you away. This is one of those...The writing is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy at times, spare and beautifully crafted; at other points it recalls William Faulkner. This is an impressive debut from a name to watch

Waterstone's Books Quarterly

Patrick Lane made his name as a poet. Goodness, can you tell. He has a fierce eye for detail and imagery...Breathtaking...Not only a searing portrait of a time and place...but also a noir-ish thriller...A really impressive debut

Metro

It is powerfully and ... grippingly written... the descriptions of the natural world are very fine...Lane does have the knack of making his characters come to life

Allan Massie, Scotsman

Meanwhile, the acclaimed Canadian poet Patrick Lane has struck out in a new direction, completing his debut novel, Red Dog, Red Dog. As a long-term fan of the sheer variety and ambition of Canadian writing, I was hugely excited by the prospect, and the novel - an uncompromising family story set in the 1950s - does not disappoint. It will appear in this country from Heinemann in May

Alex Clark, Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

Not since reading John McGahern's That They May Face The Rising Sun have I come across a novel which so surely places the lives of its characters in the context of their landscape; but whereas with McGahern that landscape was local, intimate, and rewarding to those who worked it well, Patrick Lane's land is wild and barren, unforgiving, and populated by a scarred and hunted people. Red Dog, Red Dog is a shock of a novel; immaculately crafted, deeply thoughtful, and with a broken-hearted wisdom about the ways in which damage can fall through the generations. There is little to celebrate in the world these characters inhabit, but much to admire about the way Lane has revealed it to his readers. A work of great and unconsoled love

Jon McGregor