The Dog Stars

Peter Heller

Aug 2012 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of The River: In this "end-of-the-world novel more like a rapturous beginning" (San Francisco Chronicle), Hig somehow survived the flu pandemic that killed everyone he knows. His gripping story is "an ode to friendship between two men...the strong bond between a human and a dog, and a reminder of what is worth living for" (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).

Hig's 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.

Ratings and reviews

Excellently written story. Author might have put too many emotions into a character that didn't fit the part. Otherwise its a nice short story. It is short though, and does not offer anything but a glimpse into a year of one man's life. I'd recommend it to a friend.

I really enjoyed this book. It w an easy read and hard to put down. I've read a few post apocalyptic books and this has to be my favorite of this sub-genre. One element the author did very well on was bringing to light little problems (and some not so little) that most would never think of when imagining a world after extreme population loss.

I loved Gary Paulsen's The Hatchet as a kid, and this feels like that book all grown up. It's a tale of one man's struggle with loneliness and survival in a world where most of the population has been wiped out by disease and the chaos that follows it. It's poetically written with powerful realism. A lovely and engaging book.

About the author

PETER HELLER is the best-selling author of three novels, including The Painter and Celine. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in both fiction and poetry. An award-winning adventure writer and a 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.