With the care and diligence of an archeologist, Dubus has excavated memories of his life and laid them bare on the page. These deeply personal essays focus on family relationships, writing, his visceral loathing of bullies, his struggles with gun ownership, and his laudable insight into the vulnerability of women everywhere. Ghost Dogs is a shining gem of a book. My only complaint is that most of the stories have been previously published and have not been edited for redundancy.

I received a drc from the publisher via NetGalley.

Ghost dogs was a great read. I really enjoyed the writing style even if some of the stories had difficult subject matter.

Absolutely wonderful. Reads like a selection of short stories, taking you deep in the challenges of family life.

This was my first book by Dubus III, I enjoyed his father’s work but never got around to his until now. This book was an excellent read, albeit a little repetitive in spots. I also feel that the title essay will be very difficult for many readers. All in all, I will definitely seek out more of their work.

Something about the way this author writes - - I just love it. Just an outstanding storyteller, whether fiction or non-fiction. I have not read his memoir, Townie (I will now), but this book also has the feeling of a memoir. It's a series of essays, each giving insights into Dubus' adult life. He's especially insightful when it comes to trauma in his childhood that manifests itself in adulthood and the interesting appeal of violence to men.

My one complaint about the book is that the essay format yielded some repetition. As if each essay is perfectly standalone and not part of a book. Some details are repeated, and that does allow the reader to dip in and dip out of the essays more readily; the order of them doesn't seem especially important. But the repetition seemed unnecessary.

I loved House of Sand and Fog so happy to be reminded that there's a lot more for me to read from Mr. Dubus. Looking forward to it!

Townie, published in 2011, is possibly the most haunting memoir I’ve read. It tells of the author’s tough upbringing in rough New England towns and how his violent past eventually shaped him into the man he now is. This books builds on Townie, it’s a series of essays – more often than not born out of memories of events in his life or related to people he was, or still is, close to – in which Dubus reflects his past and attempts to draw learning from it. Andre is the son of the renowned short story writer of the same name and first cousin to renowned novelist James Lee Burke (who he doesn’t mention here and possibly has had little contact with, their families having lived far apart from each other). So there is writing in his blood, so to speak, but he says here that although he's always enjoyed words and has always written, for a very long time he didn’t consider himself a writer.

For most of his early life, in fact right up to the time House of Sand and Fog, his third book, became a success he'd earned no real money from his endeavours. By the time money did start to come in he was in his forties and hadn’t owned a house or even ever lived in a house that wasn’t rented. to this point his income had primarily come from his work as a carpenter and a night-time barman as well as his wife’s earnings as a dancer and a dance instructor.

He talks of his relationship with his father, who’d left his mother quite early in his life but who’d stayed in touch and remained close through to his death. Around the time of his fiftieth birthday, his father lost a leg following a motor accident, he’d been mowed down on an interstate highway after he stopped to assist at the scene of an accident. He battled pain and depression for the remainder of his life. A really touching anecdote recalls the time Andre took his dad to an award ceremony where he met his fellow acclaimed short story writer Raymond Carver for the first and only time. Carver was to die shortly after this meeting.

Another reminiscence tells of the time when he’d just met the lady who was to become his wife and he took her up the roof of the New York Marriott Marquis hotel, in Times Square (coincidentally the hotel I stayed in during my only visit to the city). They looked down at the lights, the cars and the tiny people below – a scene I can vividly recall from the floor to ceiling window of my room, more than forty floors up. The length of the stories – because stories is how they felt to me – varied considerably: some were barely a page or two in length whilst others, such as his rumination on his history with guns and his concluding desire to have nothing more to do with them, being of almost novella length.

There’s a sense of jeopardy in just about every piece, and though some are sad others are unbelievably powerful in their messages of love and hope. A letter to his sons on the subject of love made me pause for an hour or more, so struck was I by it that I simply needed time to reflect, to clarify my thoughts and to attempt to rank myself on the pecking order of familial love. I’d call it all emotionally draining, but that feels like it contains a negative connotation and I really have no negative thoughts about this book. It’s full of honesty, humbleness and clearly articulated feelings about how things, and above all people, have impacted him through his life, and also what lessons he’s drawn from this.

This is a deeply personal book. Some might find it somewhat self-ingulgent but certainly not, I believe, self-aggrandising. At heart I think the author is simply a man who loves his family, acknowledges his weaknesses and strives to be a better person. I guess we can all take something from that.

'what we put into this world always comes back to us in one form or another...'.

After reading, and enjoying, Andre Dubus's 'Such Kindness' earlier this year, I was keen to grab this latest book full of his musings.

'Ghost Dogs' is a book of moments. Moments of love, moments of hate, moments of spontaneity, moments of gratitude and joy followed by moments of sadness and reflection: thoughtful moments. It is a book that is easy to pick up and put down, and ruminate upon regardless. Some of the essays compound upon each other, while others are just a brief, deep dive. I took away two main thoughts after reading this book: fear begets fear, which leads to anger and hate, and the hypocrisy of self-identity (what you admire in yourself, you might loathe in others and vice versa).

Overall, this is a great book if you feel in a contemplative mood. It's easy to pick off a story, take it away, and go back for more another day or immediately after. Such reflections are sure to provide epiphanies for any reader.