Terrific... And what a story it is: deftly, beautifully plotted... Nunn has written something truly powerful; to say this book is about surfing is to say The Sun Also Rises is about bullfighting. He has made the sport a metaphor for life lived at its edges, at its most intense. This is a fine, strong novel; if there's justice in the world, it will give Nunn the reputation he deserves * Men's Journal *
Like all great books, The Dogs of Winter operates on several levels of meaning-along with the page-turning suspense... Nunn trusts the tools of his trade above all else, and The Dogs of Winter is his triumph and our treasure, a mature, ambitious, highly readable masterpiece * Agenda *
Stunning... extraordinary... compelling, violent, and very American... The Dogs of Winter has enough story to keep a reader on the edge of his seat for days on end... an amazing book * BookPage *
Nunn's secret in ruling this small domain is to combine surfing with something more deserving of a spun yarn. In The Dogs of Winter, spiritually possessed Indian lands just happen to border a legendary northern California surfing spot. But there are no endless summers or dances with wolves for Nunn; his creaky old surfers numb themselves on pills and beer, and his Indians litter from pickup trucks * Newsweek *
If Elmore Leonard and Cormac McCarthy had teamed up to write a surf novel, they might have produced The Dogs of Winter... Nunn does a masterful job of driving this... potboiler to its climax... By the time the sea foam clears, Nunn has added a modern-day adventure sport to the long list of literary confrontations between man and nature-a very twentieth-century version of a struggle once played out in tales of pioneering, exploration, and the harpooning of great white whales * The Village Voice *