Lone Dog Road - by Kent Nerburn (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A tale of compassion and redemption from an award-winning author whose writing Louise Erdrich has praised as "storytelling with a greatness of heart"

During the drought-stricken summer of 1950, two Lakota boys, ages eleven and six, huddle in a boxcar hurtling through the prairie night as they run from a government agent sent to take the younger boy to an Indian boarding school. But what begins as a pursuit soon becomes a complex drama of intersecting lives as the boys make their way across the vast Dakota plains to the pipestone quarries of western Minnesota to replace their great-grandfather's channunpa, or sacred pipe, that was broken by the agent.

Alive with a rich tapestry of characters the boys meet along their journey, this riveting story is at once an exploration of the hidden corners of the human heart and a moving study of the way the land shapes the people who live, love, dream, and die upon it. Sprawling yet intimate, Lone Dog Road is destined to take its place in the grand tradition of great American road novels.

Review Quotes

"Lone Dog Road, Kent Nerburn's long-awaited literary return, is a revelation. It takes us on a journey through a barely known world where cultures rub against each other and the old knowledge of the first Americans struggles to find voice in a world that has forgotten it exists. Nerburn has lived in this world between cultures. He has traveled its roads and knows its people, and his characters breathe with the life of these travels. Join him on this journey to a world between worlds. It is a journey that asks big questions for which there are no easy answers, and a glimpse into the very heart of the American experience."
-- Robert Plant

"Great stories are born in the heart and from there make their way into the world. Lone Dog Road is a great story deeply rooted in the human heart. Using the vast canvas of the Great Plains, Kent Nerburn paints with his words the hardscrabble lives of the people who by choice or by chance call that place home. The result is breathtaking in its beauty and heartwarming in its humanity. Nerburn is a storyteller to be celebrated, and Lone Dog Road is a story to be treasured."
-- William Kent Krueger, New York Times bestselling author of Ordinary Grace and This Tender Land

"Lone Dog Road is swift, compassionate, and instantly credible. Everyone in its pages is searching for home -- the young brothers fleeing federal pursuit, their wise and weathered great-grandfather, the traveling gospel singer, and so many others. Kent Nerburn writes like a trusted friend in this sturdy outstretched hand of a novel -- grab it and hang on."
-- Leif Enger, author of Peace Like a River

"Lone Dog Road is one of those special novels that opens a door into another reality. Though Kent Nerburn is not Native, he has the magic needed to portray reservation life in the shadows of South Dakota's Black Hills. Lone Dog Road is poignant, heartfelt, and educational. Read it and learn."
-- Dan O'Brien, author of Buffalo for the Broken Heart and In the Center of the Nation

"Kent Nerburn is one of those rare individuals who has been invited to see over the fence into another culture. A lifetime of listening quietly to Native Americans of many nations has invested his work with a wisdom that has won him the admiration of Native American readers and cultural leaders and allowed him to create a nuanced and poetic account of being 'Indian' in a white man's world. He writes with grace, and he manages to tell sad stories with a deep affirmation. The integrity of Nerburn's heart and the careful insights of his prose are abundant on every page of this remarkable novel of trial and redemption."
-- Clay Jenkinson, director of the Dakota Institute

About the Author

Kent Nerburn has published sixteen books of creative nonfiction, fiction, and essays focusing on Native American and American culture and spirituality, including the New York Times bestseller Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce. He won a Minnesota Book Award in 1995 for Neither Wolf nor Dog and another in 2010 for The Wolf at Twilight.