Dodge City

‘I adored every page’ MAX PORTER

‘A perfect novel’ JONATHAN LETHEM

‘Electric, funny, and brilliantly written’ JOHN PATRICK MCHUGH

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Sisters Brothers comes Dodge City, a thrilling novel about a young man on an amphetamine fuelled cross-country road trip fleeing the Vietnam draft.

1967, California. Lee Clarke is a strait-laced twenty-three-year-old, happily in love and ambling along at college until an ill-advised fistfight leads to his expulsion. Soon, he receives his draft notice to serve in the Vietnam War, which forces Lee to make the first political decision of his life: he will leave the country and his girlfriend and head for the Canadian border.

He signs up at a drive-away car delivery service, chancing into a new Jaguar bound for the East Coast. Carrying only a single suitcase and a bag of amphetamines, Lee knows he can’t go without saying his goodbyes.

In four different towns strung out along the US, Lee visits each member of his family: his father, an alcoholic World War Two veteran; his mother, engaged in a buoyantly manic performance with her shut-in sibling; his heartbroken, misanthropic brother Harry; and finally his twin sister, Grace, a brash, young psychiatric nurse-in-training mired in romantic drama. As Lee makes his stimulated progress across the country, his past keeps rising to meet him. He can’t help but wonder, what will his decision to leave mean for his future?

A beautiful, sweeping and raucous portrait of a family in disarray and a country in flux, Dodge City confirms deWitt as one of our most brilliant satirists and a novelist of staggering heart.

Reviews

Praise for Dodge City:

‘All Patrick deWitt’s books are exquisite company, but Dodge City feels like an especially fine and honourable acquaintance to have made. I adored every page of this wise, funny, charming novel’ Max Porter, author of Shy

‘Electric, funny, and brilliantly written: Dodge City is a road trip I wanted to stay on with a cast of characters I wanted to live with for many, many, many more pages. There is romance here, there is a quiet heart that will knock you sideways, there is a family that will make you queasy in all their complexities and realness’ John Patrick McHugh, author of Fun and Games

‘Reader, I understand that I’m supposed to entice you with a comparison like “what if Hal Ashby directed a Charles Portis book” but what’s troubling me is that Dodge City appears to be an instance of a perfect novel, which by my account is a thing a novel is never allowed to be, especially one that is poised like this on the knife’s edge of hilarity and tenderness. So I’d better read it again and find some flaw and get back to you’ Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel

‘Blessed with deWitt's lively, clipped, and surprising dialogue … [A] hero's journey that interrogates the very meaning of life’ Booklist

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.