THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME

Haddon, Mark

ISBN 10: 0099450259 / ISBN 13: 9780099450252

Published by Vintage Books/Random House, New York, NY, 2004

About this Item

BRAND NEW Copy w/trace edge wear to softcover. Winner of the Whitebread Book of the Year Award. Impressive murder/mystery, set in England, narrated by 15 year old, young detective Christopher Boone. Christopher has Asperger's Syndrome; he has a keen grasp of mathematical reasoning but little understanding of what makes human beings behavior the way they do. For him, lists, descerning repetitive patterns and the underlying truth are paramount, additionally, the colors yellow and brown are disturbing, and he dislikes being touched. Having never ventured beyond the end of the road, his physical world is confined. The murder victim is a neighbor's dog. Solving of the crime propels Christopher into an alien world, and allows the reader a glimpse of the autistic mind. Seller Inventory # 018411

Bibliographic Details

Title: THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE ...

Publisher: Vintage Books/Random House, New York, NY

Publication Date: 2004

Binding: Soft cover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: None as Issued

Edition: First Edition, 22nd Printing

About this title

Synopsis:

Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year

'Outstanding...a stunningly good read' Observer

'Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement... Wise and bleakly funny' Ian McEwan

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.

Review:

The title The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (or the curious incident of the dog in the night-time as it appears within the book) is an appropriate one for Mark Haddon's ingenious novel both because of its reference to that most obsessive and fact-obsessed of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, and because its lower-case letters indicate something important about its narrator.

Christopher is an intelligent youth who lives in the functional hinterland of autism--every day is an investigation for him because of all the aspects of human life that he does not quite get. When the dog next door is killed with a garden fork, Christopher becomes quietly persistent in his desire to find out what has happened and tugs away at the world around him until a lot of secrets unravel messily.

Haddon makes an intelligent stab at how it feels to, for example, not know how to read the faces of the people around you, to be perpetually spooked by certain colours and certain levels of noise, to hate being touched to the point of violent reaction. Life is difficult for the difficult and prickly Christopher in ways that he only partly understands; this avoids most of the obvious pitfalls of novels about disability because it demands that we respect--perhaps admire--him rather than pity him. --Roz Kaveney