Bartenders, accountants, military doctors, spent lovers, rootless wanderers: this is what has become of Dunsmuir, Manitoba"s class of 1984. Country of Cold: Stories of Sex and Death, the debut collection of short fiction from Kevin Patterson (author of the travel memoir The Water In Between), is an oblique history of Dunsmuir"s graduates, from their high school humiliations to their divorces, reunions, and brushes with death.Life isn"t easy for any of Dunsmuir"s children. Some become medical doctors (perhaps because Patterson himself is a physician), but this is no guarantee of success: one of Country of Cold"s most harrowing stories recalls a family tragedy in the Keewatin District that leaves the local doctor paralyzed with guilt. Escape to the cities doesn"t work, either; Patterson"s characters find their ways to Paris, Toronto, and Montreal, only to wind up alone. Staying near home is no better, for anyone who tries that winds up looking for other means of escape--speeding over a waterfall in a capsule is only the most extreme example.Patterson"s stories are melancholic and quietly empathetic, and the loose structure of his book lets him range far beyond the adventures of a single social clique. His one great weak spot is dialogue--he is seldom capable of writing believable speech--but this doesn"t weigh his book down much, for these stories tend to avoid conversation. As such, Country of Cold is a flawed book, but it is also a decidedly satisfying one, for the range of Patterson"s experience and imagination more than make up for his tongue-tied characters. Patterson knows people, and he knows them profoundly--his stories demonstrate this amply. --Jack Illingworth, Amazon.ca