The Dogs Of Winter

Description

Heart Attacks is California's last secret spot - the premier mysto surf haunt, the stuff of rumor and legend. The rumors say you must cross Indian land to get there. They tell of hostile locals and shark-infested waters where waves in excess of thirty feet break a mile from shore. For down-and-out photographer Jack Fletcher, the chance to shoot these waves in the company of surfing legend Drew Harmon offers the promise of new beginnings. But Drew is not alone in the northern reaches of the state. His young wife, Kendra, lives there with him. Obsessed with the unsolved murder of a local girl, Kendra has embarked upon a quest of her own, a search for truth - however dark that truth may prove to be. In this desolate wasteland the search for the perfect wave becomes a quest for survival, as events lead inevitably to their final, tragic climax.

Kem Nunn is a third-generation Californian whose previous novels include The Dogs of Winter, Pomona Queen, Unassigned Territory, and Tapping the Source, which was the basis of the film Point Break. Tijuana Straits won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His latest novel, Chance, was recently made into a major TV series starring Hugh Laurie and Gretchen Mol. He lives in Southern California, where he also writes screenplays for television and film including John from Cincinnati, Deadwood and Sons of Anarchy.

Terrific... And what a story it is: deftly, beautifully plotted... Nunn has written something truly powerful; to say this book is about surfing is to say The Sun Also Rises is about bullfighting. He has made the sport a metaphor for life lived at its edges, at its most intense. This is a fine, strong novel; if there's justice in the world, it will give Nunn the reputation he deserves * Men's Journal * Like all great books, The Dogs of Winter operates on several levels of meaning-along with the page-turning suspense... Nunn trusts the tools of his trade above all else, and The Dogs of Winter is his triumph and our treasure, a mature, ambitious, highly readable masterpiece * Agenda * Stunning... extraordinary... compelling, violent, and very American... The Dogs of Winter has enough story to keep a reader on the edge of his seat for days on end... an amazing book * BookPage * Nunn's secret in ruling this small domain is to combine surfing with something more deserving of a spun yarn. In The Dogs of Winter, spiritually possessed Indian lands just happen to border a legendary northern California surfing spot. But there are no endless summers or dances with wolves for Nunn; his creaky old surfers numb themselves on pills and beer, and his Indians litter from pickup trucks * Newsweek * If Elmore Leonard and Cormac McCarthy had teamed up to write a surf novel, they might have produced The Dogs of Winter... Nunn does a masterful job of driving this... potboiler to its climax... By the time the sea foam clears, Nunn has added a modern-day adventure sport to the long list of literary confrontations between man and nature-a very twentieth-century version of a struggle once played out in tales of pioneering, exploration, and the harpooning of great white whales * The Village Voice *