Book overview
A tale of compassion and redemption from an award-winning author whose writing Louise Erdrich has praised as "storytelling with a greatness of heart"
Winner of the 2026 Reading the West Book Award for Fiction
During the drought-stricken summer of 1950, two Lakota boys, ages eleven and six, huddle in a boxcar hurtling through the prairie night as they run from a government agent sent to take the younger boy to an Indian boarding school. But what begins as a pursuit soon becomes a complex drama of intersecting lives as the boys make their way across the vast Dakota plains to the pipestone quarries of western Minnesota to replace their great-grandfather's channunpa, or sacred pipe, that was broken by the agent.
Alive with a rich tapestry of characters the boys meet along their journey, this riveting story is at once an exploration of the hidden corners of the human heart and a moving study of the way the land shapes the people who live, love, dream, and die upon it. Sprawling yet intimate, Lone Dog Road is destined to take its place in the grand tradition of great American road novels.