Note: Sandi Doughton, along with an expert panel, will be appearing at Powell's City of Books on Friday, June 21, at 7:30 p.m. When my editor at...
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Jana Navratil, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by Jana Navratil)
The writing is very unique and takes a few pages to get used to, but it becomes so personal and powerful that I inhabited the world of Hig and his beloved dog, Jasper. I don't think I fully returned to reality during the 3 days of reading. And I know it will stay with me for a long time.
The author is a poet, a pilot, an outdoor adventure writer, and a cat owner. Now he is an outstanding fiction writer as well.
Glen Duncan says it well on the dust jacket: "Make time and space for this savage, tender, brilliant book."
Gordon Ginsberg, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by Gordon Ginsberg)
Beautiful, spare, and compassionate adventure, features men and women with guns and longings - some of them with poetry - in a post-apocalyptic American Mountain West.
timmyport, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by timmyport)
Relationships are tough at the end of the world. Who do you trust? How do you break through mistrust and establish connections? This book brilliantly swings back and forth between trust and apprehension, despair and hope, family and strangers. In the end, can you really survive on your own, and would you want to anyway?
A post-apocalyptic story with an open, elegant heart, Heller's debut novel follows a pilot, Hig, and an ex-military man, Bangley, in their fight for survival. Although stuck together in an uneasy partnership, they each flawlessly compensate for the deficits in the other and guard their "home" — an abandoned airport — from marauding intruders. Even as danger lurks around every corner and death is present in every exchange, the two work together as a well-oiled machine. Yet, nine years on, Hig is lost and yearning for something he can't quite name. Leaving Bangley on his own, Hig takes off in his little Cessna and flies beyond the point of no return, holding onto the only thing he can — hope.
The Dog Stars is an achingly beautiful book with characters that are wholly human. It's a dazzling story full of loss, pain, and sorrow, but also truth. And every page is absolutely humming with brilliance.
by Dianah
"Review"
by Library Journal,
"Great expectations for this first novel, featuring a pilot lost in a world gutted by a flu pandemic. When he receives a random radio transmission, he realizes that he's not alone. Heller comes naturally by the edgy adventure promised here."
"Review"
by Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted,
"Leave it to Peter Heller to imagine a post-apocalyptic world that contains as much loveliness as it does devastation. His likable hero, Hig, flies around what was once Colorado in his 1956 Cessna, chasing all the same things we chase in these pre-annihilation days: love, friendship, the solace of the natural world, the chance to perform some small kindness, and a good dog for a co-pilot. The Dog Stars is a wholly compelling and deeply engaging debut."
"Review"
by Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan and The Ruins,
"Take the sensibility of Hemingway. Or James Dickey. Place it in a world where a flu mutation has wiped out ninety-nine percent of the population. Add in a heartbroken man with a fishing rod, some guns, a small plane. Don't forget the dog. Now imagine this man retains more hope than might be wise in such a battered and brutal time. More trust. More hunger for love — more capacity for it, too. That's what Peter Heller has given us in his beautifully written first novel. The Dog Stars is a gripping tale of one man's fight for survival against impossibly long odds. A man who has lost nearly everything but his soul. And what's so moving about Heller's book is that he shows us how sometimes a big soul is the only thing a man needs: the keystone, the center pillar, the hunk of masonry upon which all else will rise or fall."
"Review"
by Julianna Baggott, author of Pure,
"Heller is a masterful storyteller and The Dog Stars is a beautiful tribute to the resilience of nature and the relentless human drive to find meaning and deep connections with life and the living. In this chillingly realistic post-apocalyptic setting, readers will root for Heller's characters and be moved by their toughness as well as their tenderness."
"Review"
by Glen Duncan, author of The Last Werewolf and Talulla Rising,
"The Dog Stars is a giant of a novel that goes about its profound business with what looks alarmingly like ease. For all those who thought Cormac McCarthy's The Road the last word on the post-apocalyptic world — think again. Peter Heller has dark and glittering news from the future, and delivers it in prose that stops you like a wolf in the snow. Make time and space for this savage, tender, brilliant book."
"Review"
by Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred),
"Richly evocative yet streamlined journal entries propel the high-stakes plot while simultaneously illuminating Hig's nuanced states of mind as isolation and constant vigilance exact their toll, along with his sorrow for the dying world....Heller's surprising and irresistible blend of suspense, romance, social insight, and humor creates a cunning form of cognitive dissonance neatly pegged by Hig as an 'apocalyptic parody of Norman Rockwell' — a novel, that is, of spiky pleasure and signal resonance."
"Review"
by Publishers Weekly (starred),
"In the tradition of postapocalyptic literary fiction such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Jim Crace's The Pesthouse, this hypervisceral first novel by adventure writer Heller (Kook) takes place nine years after a superflu has killed off much of mankind....With its evocative descriptions of hunting, fishing, and flying, this novel, perhaps the world's most poetic survival guide, reads as if Billy Collins had novelized one of George Romero's zombie flicks. From start to finish, Heller carries the reader aloft on graceful prose, intense action, and deeply felt emotion."
"Synopsis"
by Random,
A riveting, powerful novel about a pilot living in a world filled with loss — and what he is willing to risk to rediscover, against all odds, connection, love, and grace.
Narrated by a man who is part warrior and part dreamer, a hunter with a great shot and a heart that refuses to harden, The Dog Stars is both savagely funny and achingly sad, a breathtaking story about what it means to be human.
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