The Dogs Of Winter

Out of the blue Jack Fletcher, a former hot-shot surf photographer now surviving on hack work, cheap beer and muscle relaxants, gets a call from the surfing magazine he worked for back in his glory days. Assigned to photograph Drew Harmon surfing the remote reef known as 'Heart Attacks', the photographer can't quite believe his luck: both the surfer and the wave are the stuff of legend, and mean a ticket back into the big time.

With two young surf punks in tow, Fletcher heads off for the grim wilderness of Northern California, and the Indian territory where Harmon now lives with his half-mad wife Kendra, who roams the woods at night wearing the clothes of a murdered girl. This is not what Jack had expected, and things get worse.

To reach the fabled Heart Attacks and ride the winter waves Harmon, Fletcher and the punks must cross the tract of blasted headland known to the local Hupa, Yurok and Tolowan Indians as 'The Devil's Hoof'. When a child dies in an accident, the white men are blamed; the Indians, swearing vengeance, kidnap and brutalise Kendra, then set off to kill the surfers.

In this desolate wasteland the search for the perfect wave becomes a quest for survival, as events lead inevitably to their final, tragic climax.



Kem Nunn is a third-generation Californian whose previous novels include The Dogs of Winter, Pomona Queen, Unassigned Territory, and Tapping the Source, which was the basis of the film Point Break. Tijuana Straits won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. His latest novel, Chance, was recently made into a major TV series starring Hugh Laurie and Gretchen Mol. He lives in Southern California, where he also writes screenplays for television and film including John from Cincinnati, Deadwood and Sons of Anarchy.



Terrific... And what a story it is: deftly, beautifully plotted... Nunn has written something truly powerful; to say this book is about surfing is to say The Sun Also Rises is about bullfighting. He has made the sport a metaphor for life lived at its edges, at its most intense. This is a fine, strong novel; if there's justice in the world, it will give Nunn the reputation he deserves



Like all great books, The Dogs of Winter operates on several levels of meaning-along with the page-turning suspense... Nunn trusts the tools of his trade above all else, and The Dogs of Winter is his triumph and our treasure, a mature, ambitious, highly readable masterpiece



Stunning... extraordinary... compelling, violent, and very American... The Dogs of Winter has enough story to keep a reader on the edge of his seat for days on end... an amazing book



Nunn's secret in ruling this small domain is to combine surfing with something more deserving of a spun yarn. In The Dogs of Winter, spiritually possessed Indian lands just happen to border a legendary northern California surfing spot. But there are no endless summers or dances with wolves for Nunn; his creaky old surfers numb themselves on pills and beer, and his Indians litter from pickup trucks



If Elmore Leonard and Cormac McCarthy had teamed up to write a surf novel, they might have produced The Dogs of Winter... Nunn does a masterful job of driving this... potboiler to its climax... By the time the sea foam clears, Nunn has added a modern-day adventure sport to the long list of literary confrontations between man and nature-a very twentieth-century version of a struggle once played out in tales of pioneering, exploration, and the harpooning of great white whales