The Dog Stars

2014 Longlist

A San Francisco Chronicle and Atlantic Monthly Best Book of the Year.
Hig somehow survived the flu pandemic that killed everyone he knows. Now his wife is gone, his friends are dead, and he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, Jasper, and a mercurial, gun-toting misanthrope named Bangley.
But when a random transmission beams through the radio of his 1956 Cessna, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life exists outside their tightly controlled perimeter. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return and follows its static-broken trail, only to find something that is both better and worse than anything he could ever hope for.

(From Publisher)

About the Author

Peter Heller holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in both fiction and poetry. An award-winning adventure writer and longtime contributor to NPR, Heller is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure, and a regular contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek. He is also the author of several nonfiction books, including Kook, The Whale Warriors, and Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

Librarians’ Comments

Heller’s first novel is a quiet and powerful alternative to the recent riotous upsurge of the apocalyptic genre. It is sparse, beautiful and written in a uniquely personal style.

Set in Colorado in a post apocalyptic world, The Dog Stars poetically tells the physical and emotional survival story of Hig, his gun-toting neighbour, Bangley, and his stalwart dog, Jasper.