War Stories We Tell Ourselves: Infotainment and Conflict In the Post-Fact Era

Kevin Patterson grew up in Manitoba, and put himself through medical school by joining the Canadian army. Now a specialist in internal medicine, he practises in the Arctic and on the coast of British Columbia. His first book, The Water In Between (1999), a travel memoir of a sailing expedition in the Pacific, was a New York Times Notable Book. Country of Cold (2003), his debut short fiction collection, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2003 and the inaugural City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. He was co-editor of Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan in the Words of Its Participants (2008). His latest novel, News from the Red Desert (2016, Random House of Canada) has been acclaimed by The Globe and Mail as “one of the finest war novels this country has ever seen.”