Longlisted for the 2024 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour

In this darkly funny debut from Lucie Pagé, characters collide in unexpected ways as they search to create meaning in their lives.

A university English sessional teacher searches for his missing blind pit bull, not entirely aware that his relationship is coming unravelled. Katherine, his girlfriend, pays far more attention to her walk-on role in an alternative theatre production. Fourteen-year-old Becca struggles to get her mother’s attention, while her mother provides calorie-wise snacking and fashion advice and dates Becca’s psychologist. Karl fails to control his embarrassing and shameful bad habit at his dead-end telemarketing job.

Pagé weaves together narratives that speak of people adrift in the conflicting tides of the first decades of the twenty-first century in a novel that echoes the works of Lynda Barry.

Lucie Pagé is a French-Canadian author and screenwriter whose fiction has been published in Carte Blanche, Robot Butt, and This Magazine. Her story “Lawn Ornaments” won This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Pagé is also an award-winning 2-D animator with an interest in sound design. She moved to Toronto to study theatre, but stayed for its rich cultural scene. In 2018, she was lured away to work on a Netflix series in Vancouver, BC for six months. She now divides her time between Toronto and Vancouver Island.

Lucie Pagé's profile page

• Long-listed, Leacock Medal for Humour

“Peeling back the binary of cold and explosive personalities, ambition, anxieties, and desire, Lost Dogs is a story about what all of us fear and long for. Pagé brings her acclaimed television writing experience to bear on the novel, creating a compulsively readable, character-driven tale.”

Open Book

“A beautiful mess of protagonists who transform before our very eyes as they search for their home in the world. I adored Lost Dogs and Pagé's clever writing style. Her characters live in the back of my mind.”

McKenzie, Changing Hands Bookstore, Tempe, Arizona

“A novel about the best and worst of us, but mostly the latter. Darkly funny for sure.”

Instagram

“I definitely recommend this as a clever take on modern existence and self-discovery that will be on my mind for a long time to come.”

Bookaholic Bex