The Power of the Dog: NOW AN OSCAR NOMINATED FILM STARRING BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH

Flinty naturalism, lean prose and authentic portrait of the American frontier...it without doubt deserves belatedly to reach a wider audience

The Sunday Times

[Savage's] prose is vivid and direct. [his] descriptions of nature have real power. a slow-burn psychological western.

The Times

An exhilarating drama between two brothers set in Twenties Montana, and better even than Stoner

Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph

Something aching and lonely and terrible of the west is caught forever on Savage's pages, and the most compelling and painful of [his] books is The Power of the Dog, a work of literary art

Annie Proulx, from her afterword

If there were justice in the literary marketplace, surely one or another of Thomas Savage's dozen novels would have been topping bestseller lists for the past 30-odd years..

New York Times Book Review

Savage writes like thunder and lightning. A flash will illuminate startling detail, a rumble will bring a fierce revelation, a philosophy, a big picture. It has a jarring, unsettling effect, like many great books, a reminder of inevitable change, of civilizations crumbling

Los Angeles Times

Readers were spooked by this iconoclastic Western when it first appeared in 1967, and it was quickly buried...Savage is a master of narrative technique, and he takes sardonic pleasure in introducing Zane Grey to Sigmund Freud. Truths that once shocked now satisfy: better late than never

Boston Globe

Optimistically billed as the next Stoner, this 1967 reissue is in fact the better novel...a rich and challenging psychodrama, based on brilliant characterisation... With its echoes of East of Eden and Brokeback Mountain, this satisfyingly complex story deserves another shot at rounding up public admiration

Guardian

Rediscovered American classic.

Mail on Sunday

Savage's powerful novel.packs a huge emotional punch.

Psychologies

The Power of the Dog resurfaces to a new generation of readers, less likely to skirt around the homosexual undercurrent that drives this text to its ultimate twist of an ending. Savage achieves.an intense realness, unearthing the inner darkness of the American Dream.

Skinny

The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage is, quite simply, one of the finest contemporary novels I have ever read: set on a ranch in 1920s Montana, it is a taut, complex and superbly written exploration of family and landscape, of belonging and alienation, of repressed sensitivity and desire in an unforgivingly red-blooded world. There are scenes and characters so powerful that they haunt the memory like dreams, for the novel carries a charge well beyond its final, riveting pages.

Adam Thorpe

Savage is brilliant on men and women alike in his keenly-observed psychological drama

Lucy Scholes, Independent

The shocking turn of the book's final pages keeps the story bright as a blade to the end...This is the perfect example of a book that never quite made it to the rank of classic...but is more than worthy of resurrection now

Erica Wagner, New Statesman

Entirely deserving of its Stoner comparison

A Life in Books blog

First published in 1967, this reissue is becoming a word-of-mouth classic.

Emerald Street