THE DOG OF THE NORTH

From the National Book Award longlisted author of The Portable Veblen, a great journey in a borrowed van that's long on joy in a dark, dark world.

Penny Rush is simply not the type to judge someone based on their vehicle. And yet, enter The Dog of the Northa van with yellow gingham curtains, wood paneling, a futon, a piñata, stiff breaks, and difficult steering. It is Penny's getaway car from a failed marriage, a fractured family, and all the uncertainty contained within the terrifying notion of the future. Delightfully discursive, unwilling to abandon her youthful assumptions about how the gears of the world turn, and uncannily capable of avoiding the well-trodden path, Penny is a virtuoso at all that's possible once you've established that you've reached plan Q. And so she is the perfect match for The Dog. In The Dog of the North, Elizabeth McKenzie, beloved novelist of California and its discontents, goes back to Santa Barbara in 2015, also known as the world immediately before everything went off the rails. For Penny, however, it's absolutely not a time short on crises: Her beloved grandfather is being exiled by his cruel second wife. Her parents have been lost in the Australian outback. Her grandmother is found with a radioactive corpse in her woodshed, and a weapon known as "the scintillator." Penny is searching for much in her life, and she sets out in The Dog to find it. This dryly humorous, thoroughly winsome novel finds the purpose in life's curveballs, insisting that even when we are painfully warped by those we love most, we can be brought ever closer to our truest self. Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of a collection, Stop That Girl, short-listed for The Story Prize, the novel MacGregor Tells the World, a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and Library Journal Best Book of the year, and the novel The Portable Veblen, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Women's Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and has been recorded for NPR's Selected Shorts. She was an NEA/Japan US-Friendship Commission Fellow in 2010. She received her MA from Stanford, was an assistant fiction editor at The Atlantic, and currently teaches creative writing at Stanford's school of continuing studies.