Red Dog Farm

An atmospheric, moving, and droll coming-of-age story about a young man's transformative year on his family's struggling Icelandic cattle farm as he falls in love, discovers a fondness for farming, and yearns to connect with his stoic father, who remains haunted by a tragic past.

Growing up on his family's cattle farm in western Iceland has given young Orri an appreciation for the beauty found in the mundanities of pastoral life. Unsure, however, whether he wants to make a life of farming himself, he has left his no-nonsense Lithuanian Jewish mother and his taciturn Pabbi, a native Icelander, to attend university in Reykjavik.

A survivor of the 1973 Eldfell volcanic eruption and a lifelong farmer, Pabbi is no stranger to cycles of life and death, growth and destruction. But hardscrabble life on a farm has long lost its charm, and Pabbi falls into a depression not long after Orri leaves for school. Orri, feeling adrift and aimless in his first year away, decides to return home and help Pabbi.

Over the next year, despite their conflicting attitudes, father and son run the farm together. Orri also experiences the pangs of early love after an unexpected meeting with Mihan, a young Filipino woman from Akureyri. Eventually, the relationship blossoms. By year's end, Orri must face the decision of whether he wants to-and should-return to university, and what a future with Mihan would hold, if she'll have him.

"A cold-winded, gorgeous gust of a book, Red Dog Farm solidifies Nathaniel Ian Miller as one of my favorite writers around. At once raw and exquisite, the book examines the endless complexities of family, the line between contentment and longing, and what happens when you pull a thread of history only to find your future. Its rural Icelandic setting, as wildly beautiful as it is severe, is the perfect framework for a story whose characters simmer with love, even as they struggle to show it. Like any dormant volcano, it's only a matter of time. This is a book to cherish."--David Arnold, New York Times bestselling author of Mosquitoland and The Electric Kingdom
"Nathaniel Ian Miller delivers another reverent, deeply moving study of character and place in Red Dog Farm, a novel wrought with staggering truth and grace. Painted in assured prose, vivid in tenderness and humor, each movement of the story feels like a gift of humanity. You'll emerge from the folds of this remote Icelandic farm as if transported from a sacred place where love has been hard-won, purchased with sweat and honor and enormous stores of emotional truth. Red Dog Farm is a book that will change you."--Thao Thai, author of Banyan Moon

Nathaniel Ian Miller is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and has been translated into four languages. A former journalist for newspapers in New Mexico, Colorado, Wisconsin and Montana, he now lives with his family on a farm in Vermont.

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