Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #714 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-01
• Released on: 2004-03-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
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

Daily Telegraph
'A beautifully written book...Warm and often funny'

Time Out
'Remarkable...Impressive...Rewarding'

Customer Reviews

Beautiful
This is the most beautiful book I have ever read - definitely my number one. It deals with a difficult subject in a thoroughly enjoyable manner. At times frustrating, at times hilarious but at all times your heart is with the main character, hoping that someone will understand.

Good at first but in the end I hated it...
The first twenty pages or so of the book flew by at a remarkable pace and I was really enthralled in the story and the plot.

Then it all changed. The main character Christopher has to be the single most annoying and infuriating narrator of any book I have ever ever read. The further I read the more I wanted to make christopher meet the same sticky end as the dog... The last half of the book was really hard work as the story became more and more unfollowable, not because of the writing, Haddon has written a good book, its just christophers antics and and speak grated my nerves so much!lol!

A Really Enjoyable & Informative Read
For me it's not the story that was the best part of the book, it's the way Asperger's Syndrome is explained through it.
The story itself is short but the experiences of Christopher in his quest for the truth about what happened to Wellington the dog really try to make you understand what people with Asperger's go through, and that's thanks to the way the author has written it.
Really good and glad I read it.