The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time [Signed]

Mark Haddon

ISBN 10: 0385605870 / ISBN 13: 9780385605878

Published by David Fickling Books, Oxford, 2003

About this Item

Oxford: David Fickling Books, 2003. First Children's Edition, with full numberline. Octavo (22.5cm); [viii],[272]pp. Illustrated dust jacket with £10.99 price intact; boards in red cloth with gilt lettering to spine. Jacket is lightly rubbed along edges with light spotting to flaps where prior owner's makeshift covering adhered a bit. Boards are clean and sharp. Spine faintly cocked. Binding is sound and pages unmarked. Signed by the author without inscription and dated "Cape 1 May 2003" on full title. An Adult Edition, differing only in binding and dust jacket, was published simultaneously by Jonathan Cape the same year. Seller Inventory # 30310

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the ...

Publisher: David Fickling Books, Oxford

Publication Date: 2003

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Christopher is 15 and lives in Swindon with his father. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes but finds it hard to understand other people. When he discovers a dead dog on a neighbour's lawn he decides to solve the mystery and write a detective thriller about it. As in all good detective stories, however, the more he unearths, the deeper the mystery gets - for both Christopher and the rest of his family.

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