Lone Dog Road: A Story of People (Ep4)

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Readers love stories.

And I love to tell stories. But stories are made by people, and when I tell a story it is the people in the story that matter to me.

In Lone Dog Road, I offer you the stories of good people — honest people, struggling people, fascinating people — told slowly, deeply, and from the heart. Two little Lakota boys, one six and one eleven, on the run from a government agent; a white man adrift in life and grieving over his deceased dog; two Indian women — one Lakota and one Dakota — one in a wheelchair and one carrying an almost unbearable emotional burden, who have been friends since childhood; the Lakota woman’s white husband, who was studying to be a priest but lost his faith when he found himself overwhelmed by a larger undeniable truth; the boys’ Lakota mother whose heart has been hardened by life and the reality of Native experience; her grandfather who sees the world through different eyes and has a different understanding of the forces that control our lives, a Black traveling gospel singer who has made his life traveling through the often inhospitable small towns of the South Dakota prairies, and an old yellow dog.

They tell their stories in their own voices, bringing us along as all of their lives slowly and inexorably intertwine. And slowly, inexorably, a larger truth is revealed.

There are those who would say I don’t have a right to tell stories about people of backgrounds different from my own, and certainly not in their own voices. But those people are wrong. There are things that are common to the human heart, and though our lives may be shaped by experiences as different from each other as the earth from the stars, those common experiences — love and yearning and hope and suffering — transcend our differences and make us one with each other in ways that no barriers of culture or personal experience can deny.

I hope you will trust me to tell the stories of these good people. If you give yourself over to them and allow them to speak to you in their own heartfelt and authentic voices, I believe Lone Dog Road will reward you with a reading experience that is about far more than what it seems on the surface. Yes, it is a story about two small boys on a desperate journey and the people that they meet along the way. But beneath this surface is a story of redemption and revelation and a world far deeper, far more spiritual, and far more complex than we realize.

In its simplest terms, Lone Dog Road is a spiritual mystery in the guise of a road book; a literary adagio that reveals its meaning slowly and in layers. It doesn’t gallop out of the gate with a breathless plot. But if you give yourself over to it and allow its story to unfold and its layers to reveal themselves, your patience will be rewarded. You will find yourself in the presence of a book that touches all the themes that have been so important to me in my writing: the power of the land, the presence of the spiritual, and glimpses of the unprotected human heart.

9 thoughts on “Lone Dog Road: A Story of People (Ep4)”

  1. Hello Kent,
    Of course I pre-ordered this book! Set in 1950, being released on (still) the 36th anniversary of my 39 birthday is a must have. Although, I do own every book you ever released and my opinion, you are a very gifted, pure of heart author. Please keep writing.
    Best regards, Linda

  2. Pre-ordered, of course, and looking forward.
    An aside: I just introduced the Wolf trilogy to a friend whose mother recently died at the age of 90+ years. Friend did not know about your books, but after my Nerburn recommendation, friend mentioned that he & siblings were raised with a deep respect for our Native American culture, our First People. Last I heard, friend was on his way to Chile, where he spent some years in the Peace Corps earlier. He reported some time on the plane reading Neither Wolf Nor Dog with great happiness for the recommendation. Thinking maybe Lone Dog Is my next recommendation, but I’ll wait until I read it myself. Thank you, Kent!

  3. Kent, Will your new book be available by Kindle? Unfortunately my vision is horsepoop and I need a larger font. Kindle is helpful in that way.

  4. I’m sure it will be available on Kindle, Linda. That’s up to the publisher, but they have all their books available through Kindle, so there should be no problem.

  5. “Lone Dog Road” has been on Amazon for a while now (weeks?) as available to pre-order in Kindle format. The Digital List Price shown is $14.99, but the pre-order price is currently $9.99.

  6. This is completely out of my hands. Once it comes to publication I’m like a passenger on a plane. I’d go for the $9.99 if I were you.

  7. I’ve been fortunate enough to have read this book already (twice — it’s one of the perks of being the publisher), and it ranks up there as one of my all-time favorites.

  8. William R Feltes

    I’m pre-ordered! Can’t arrive quickly enough! Congratulations Mr. Nerburn and all those folks involved with this book.

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