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Lost Dog opens with a cat inquisitively turning towards us - a character inviting us to a vast land.

And we can indeed speak of character, so much does Lost Dog resemble a fable. Throughout the pages, Bates is the solitary traveler on an odyssey, coming across with elusive figures, crossing depopulated places that, always, retain the mysterious traces of a past presence - wreckage landed on the branches of a dead tree, details of a forgotten domestic life, blood stains on immaculate snow... And sometimes, among the crystal-clear images, a tenderness emerges here and there, rays of warmth found in a woman's gaze or in a benevolent flame.

Through valleys and mountains, Ian Bates offers with Lost Dog a portrait of a mysterious American North West, whose strangeness and magnificent solitude he captures like no other.