Dodge City

From bestselling author Patrick deWitt comes Dodge City, a thrilling novel about a young man on an amphetamine fueled cross-country road trip fleeing the draft for the safe haven of Canada.

1967, California. Lee Clarke is a strait-laced twenty-three-year-old from the small town of Concrete, Washington. He is ambling along at college as the social revolution of the sixties unfolds among his peers, until an ill-advised fistfight leads to his expulsion. Days later, a draft letter lands on his doormat, calling him up to fight in the Vietnam War.

Lee then makes the first political decision of his life: he will leave the country and head for the border.

He kisses his girlfriend for the last time and signs up at a drive-away car delivery service and scores a Jaguar bound for the East Coast. He takes with him only a single suitcase and a bag of amphetamines to speed his course. But Lee knows he can’t slip the country without saying the rest of his goodbyes.

In four different towns strung out along the country, Lee visits each member of his family: his father, a World War Two veteran in a state of degradation; his mother, engaged in a buoyantly manic and never-ending performance with her shut-in sibling; his heartbroken, misanthropic brother Harry; and finally his twin sister Grace, a brash, young nurse-in-training mired in romantic drama at a Manhattan psychiatric hospital. He’s speeding towards his future, and yet the past keeps rising up to meet him. Will he make it across the border the same man as when he started this journey?

A sweeping portrait of a country in flux and a family in disarray, Dodge City is a beautiful and raucous exploration of family, belonging, love and war. Deeply moving and delightfully off-kilter, it confirms deWitt as one of our most brilliant satirists and a novelist of staggering heart.

Reviews

Praise for Patrick deWitt:

‘The great chronicler of American weirdos’ Slate

‘DeWitt's particular comic genius is to evoke the darkness behind the dazzle … whichever style he adopts or genre he inhabits, deWitt remains a true original’ Guardian

‘One of the great literary ventriloquists, producing funny, quirky, richly imagined novels shaped each time by a wildly different narrative voice’ Daily Mail

‘DeWitt is a true original, conjuring up dark and hilarious images’ The Times

‘DeWitt's great gift lies in his ability to depict the Everyman in extremis – heroism hidden in plain sight’ Telegraph

‘Patrick deWitt is an artful ventriloquist … a distinctive and utterly beguiling voice’ Metro

‘A fresh, lively voice that surprises at every turn’ Kate Atkinson, author of Transcription

‘Like Flannery O'Connor shot through with the Coen brothers’ Andrew O'Hagan, author of Caledonian Road

About the author

Patrick deWitt is the author of five novels including The Sisters Brothers, which won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Governor General Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2011. Born in British Columbia, Canada, he now resides in Portland, Oregon.