Dodge City

‘A perfect novel … on the knife’s edge of hilarity and tenderness’ JONATHAN LETHEM

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt, comes Dodge City, a thrilling novel about a young man on an amphetamine fuelled 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. It confirms deWitt as one of our most brilliant satirists and a novelist of staggering heart.

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.