DEEP RIVER NIGHT

In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy, Russell Banks, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Annie Proulx, this much-anticipated new novel by the bestselling author of Red Dog, Red Dog is set over the course of 48 hours in a remote sawmill community where violence, complicity, and inaction run deep, and explores the burden of bearing witness to a terrible crime.

World War Two vet Art Kenning is the alcholic first-aid man in an isolated sawmill village in the interior of B.C., where he dreads the sound of the five whistles that summon him to the mill floor whenever a worker is hurt. Traumatized by an incident in Holland, when he stood by while members of his unit committed a horrific act, he loses himself in drink, and in memories of the love affair he had with a woman in wartime Paris. But the sad comfort of his self-imposed detachment is shattered when one of the most powerful men at the mill arrives at his door late one evening to ask for his help. What unfolds over the course of that night and following day will force Art to confront acts of evil, both in the present and the past, as well as the tragic consequences of his own inaction.

Alternating with Art's story is that of Joel, a teenaged runaway who owes his life to Art, and Wang Po, the mill's cook and a survivor of the Rape of Nanjing. Through the eyes of this trio of outsiders, the reader is brought deep into the morally ambiguous world of the sawmill, revealing a place where the undercurrents of violence are never far from the surface.

PATRICK LANE's first novel, Red Dog, Red Dog, was a finalist for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the Giller Prize. Lane is one of Canada's pre-eminent poets, and his distinguished career spans fifty years and twenty-five volumes of poetry. His memoir, There Is a Season, won the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and the inaugural British Columbia Award for Canadian Non-fiction, and was also a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, the Hubert Evans Non-fiction Prize, the Pearson Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Non-fiction. He has been a writer in residence and teacher at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and the University of Toronto in Ontario. Patrick Lane lives near Victoria, B.C., with his wife, the poet Lorna Crozier.

• Internationally published and bestselling author Patrick Lane follows on the global success of Red Dog, Red Dog (a staff pick for Waterstones and The Guardian in the UK) with a second novel even more stunning than the first—a redemptive, melancholic and ultimately hopeful story from the poet, memoirist and novelist hailed as Canada's William Faulkner
• Over the course of 24 hours at a mid-twentieth-century logging camp, Deep River Night introduces us to a ravaged WWII veteran and a Chinese cook who survived the Nanking Massacre, among many other memorable characters (including a cast of compelling women), as a revenge plot is set in motion and romances bloom
• Previous publishers include World Dutch (Signatuur), World Greek (Kastaniotis Editions), UK (Heinemann)