Welcome to the official website of author Patrick Lane. In this website, you will find an overview of Patrick Lane's books, a profile and biography, a list of upcoming readings and other public appearances, new works in progress, and contact information. To purchase any of the books on this site, click on the books' images.

One of Canada's most highly acclaimed poets, and author of an award-winning memoir, Patrick Lane, with this astonishing debut, suddenly introduces himself as a major novelist.

Red Dog, Red Dog unfolds over the course of one week in and around a small town in the Okanagan Valley in 1958, with stories arcing back in time to the 1920s and '30s on the prairies and to the harsh life of settlers in the 1880s West.

The novel centres on the Stark family. There is Elmer, a violent man whose troubled beginnings took him from his home when he was a boy in 1918, leaving him to wander alone across the West, eking out a living here and there as a hired hand. Lillian, who married Elmer shortly after the Depression, when she was seventeen, finds herself retreating steadily into isolation. Their sons, Tom and Eddy, now in their twenties, are bound together by the secrets of their childhood years. Unrepentant, Eddy speeds freely along his reckless path, defiant, vulnerable. Tom, a loner, tries to make out of the fragments of the past a story that can explain the way things are. After a terrible discovery causes him to come face to face with something he has long hidden from himself, his life will take a different course. One night at a party, Eddy goes too far, and a spiral of events is set in motion, leading to the novelís last, dramatic moments. Along the way, we meet a cast of vividly drawn characters, including petty criminal Billy Holdman, who learned early on to fend for himself; Joe Urbanowski, son of immigrant parents, whose deep-rooted bitterness goes back to his school days; Wayne Reid, who has been spoiled by his rich father, and is someone who will go to any lengths to win approval; mill worker and dog man Carl Janek, whose friendship with Tom since he was a boy becomes an unlikely inheritance; and Marilyn Bly, the daughter of a wounded war vet, a wayward high-school girl whose love for Tom is immediate and fierce.

Red Dog, Red Dog is a deeply moving novel about the legacies of the past and the possibilities of salvation that is marked by stunning writing and an utterly compelling and original story.

"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

“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 continuation of the kind of story it has told so well.” - Ross Wilson – Times Literary Supplement

“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 Books Quarterly

“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 1950’s – does not disappoint. - Alex Clark (editor of Granta).

“Set in 1958, with flashbacks to the Depression and settler era, this impressive tale of redneck life in British Columbia exudes suffering and menace.” - Adrian Turpin, Financial Times

“The writing is beautiful.” - Kate Saunders, Times

“A rich brew it is powerfully and grippingly written the descriptions of the natural world are very fine Lane does have a knack of making his characters come to life.” - Alan Massie, The Scotsman

“Patrick Lane’s Red Dog, Red Dog is a tale of blood, loyalty and redemption. The novel centers on Eddy and Tom Stark, two brothers struggling with their hardscrabble inheritance in the Okanagan Valley. Theirs is a fiercely unforgiving world, and, for the reader, an unforgettable one. The strength of Lane’s perfectly cadenced prose may bring to mind Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy and, inevitably, the Bible. There is a deep wisdom in this book and I cannot recommend it highly enough.” – Richard Bachmann, A Different Drummer Books

“An unflinchingly dark and brutal book, the violence and anger matched only by the sublime radiance of the prose. . . . Audacious. . . . While the novel is of a time and place, its significance is universal.” – Victoria Times Colonist

“Superlative, poetic, almost-epic writing, somewhat reminiscent of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy.” – Edmonton Journal

“Lane is masterful at painting his setting and characters. It’s a Canadian Appalachia, a stagnant backwater peopled with losers, no-hopers, dopers and white trash. And, when the family’s inexorable, unyielding doom descends, they deal with it as they always have, as they must. Lane retains the poet’s lyricism, and packs power and poignancy into his prose. Propelled in a downward spiral from mere madness to hell, Red Dog, Red Dog is a gripping, thrilling journey. – Hamilton Spectator

“Faulkneresque.” – Toronto Star

“I would place Lane in the company of David Adams Richards or such U.S. writers as Cormac McCarthy, Tom Franklin and Daniel Woodrell. . . . Lane’s insight into the dark corners of the human psyche is what keeps us interested in these sad, woebegone souls. Moreover, he writes prose with the felicity of the poet. I found myself regularly rereading phrases, sentences and passages in response to the sheer, hard-edged beauty of the writing.” – Waterloo Region Record

“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. . . .A work of great and unconsoled love.” - Jon McGregor, author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

“A rich variant on Cormac McCarthy’s biblically cadenced western noir and Flannery O’Connor’s Southern gothic.’ - Montreal Gazette

“Astounding. . . .The author has larded this account of almost incidental barbarity with ribbons of exquisite description, tenderness, and acute insight.” - Marian Botsford Fraser, Literary Review of Canada

“Lane has the unerring instinct for images that wound and enlighten in equal measure.’ - Globe and Mail

Patrick Lane has lived and travelled extensively around the world and his work has been published in a number of countries, including England, France, the Czech Republic, Italy, China, Japan, Chile, Colombia, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, and Russia. He has been a Writer-in-Residence and teacher at a number of educational institutions, including Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, and the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario. Patrick Lane lives near Victoria, British Columbia, with his wife, the poet Lorna Crozier.

Since he started writing in 1961, Patrick Lane has authored more than twenty books of poetry, for which he has received most of Canada's top literary awards, including the Governor General's Award, the Canadian Authors Association Award, and two National Magazine Awards. Today, his poetry appears in all major Canadian anthologies of English literature. He has also been recognized for his gardening skills, and the half-acre he tends has been featured in the Recreating Eden television film series.

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