The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Signed and numbered slipcased limited UK edition

Haddon, Mark

ISBN 10: 0224063782 / ISBN 13: 9780224063784

Published by Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2003

About this Item

UK first edition, first printing thus: signed and numbered (59/1000) limited, slipcased edition (Cape, 2003). Near fine / near fine unread condition with just very minor signs of shelfwear to book and slipcase. PLEASE READ BEFORE ORDERING Our descriptions are accurate. Photos are of the actual book(s) for sale. If you require additional photos, please ask. We will despatch your books rapidly (almost always within 24 hrs of the receipt of your order) using proper book wraps / boxes. For books sold for more than £50 we will use only despatch methods that are fully tracked, insured and will require a signature on delivery. Standard postage costs are included in our prices for UK customers. Priority UK rates are for Royal Mail Special Delivery, guaranteed by 1pm. For overseas customers, we have set a standard Abe postal rate, but will communicate direct with customers and charge the actual cost of postage and packing by tracked and insured delivery methods requiring signature. Please note that new EU regulations make it impractical for us to post books to the EU. Therefore, prospective customers from the EU are requested to email us before making an order so that we can discuss how best we might get the books they want to them. Seller Inventory # 216

Bibliographic Details

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

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd

Publication Date: 2003

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Near Fine

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

'The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears' house. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog.' 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, a form of autism. 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. Christopher is a brilliant creation, and Mark Haddon's depiction of his world is deeply moving, very funny and utterly convincing. The novel is being published simultaneously for adults by Jonathan Cape and for children by David Fickling, publisher of Philip Pullman. We are convinced that both audiences will recognise it as one of those very rare books that change the way you see everything.

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