Combining memoir and essay, cultural criticism and literary experiment, an electrifying account of living with and writing about trauma from a singular new voice in Canadian literature.

Taking as its starting point a harrowing event in which the writer and her family were held hostage during the Christmas holidays of 2009, Dog Days expands prismatically to trace the paths of trauma in the incident’s aftermath.

Braiding the narrative with poetry and dreams and bringing her experience into conversation with the voices of literary and artistic influences—from Sylvia Plath to Dora Maar to David Lynch—LaBarge provides readers with a richer, somatic understanding of trauma and how it resists the easy container of narrative.

Interspersed in her rigorous searching are memories of what she survived, told with visceral sensory detail and in a voice that in its frankness, intimacy, and vulnerability refuses to let the reader look away. The result is as profoundly intelligent as it is deeply moving, a book unlike any other and one destined to become an essential text.