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: #613 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

Mesmirising
The narrator of this remarkable novel is Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old boy who has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism, that means he is unable to understand human emotions. He is, however, highly intelligent and can rattle off all kinds of facts and figures, particularly those pertaining to his speciality - maths.

The book opens with Christopher stumbling upon a dead dog lying in his neighbour's garden. The dog is pinned to the ground by a pitchfork. Immediately he decides to find out what happened to the dog and, inspired by his favourite fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, he launches a "murder investigation" that rocks both the local community and his own strangely mundane and ordered life.

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" has won many awards - and with good reason. It's one of those rare books, originally written for children but now popular with an increasing number of adults.

The language is simple, but this simplicity renders Christopher's voice more powerful. You really get into his head and see the world through his emotionally dissociated mind. The charming diagrams and drawings littered throughout the book only add to this.

As you plough through each short chapter, you are able to piece together the revelations of Christopher's investigation long before he is able to comprehend them. This gives the story further urgency, because you wish you could stop him from proceeding any farther, if not to shield him from the awful truth, at least to save his family from the emotional outfall. But Christopher plods on regardless in his own naive way, and there's nothing you can do.

The great beauty of this lovely book is not just the narrator's unique voice, it is Haddon's careful balance between bleak comedy and great sadness. He never resorts to sentimentality, which only makes the pathos all the more real.

I loved this story and read it in two sittings. It's original, witty and illuminating. No matter what your age, you'd be hard pressed to find a more interesting and page-turning novel.

Truly astonishing!
Many of the people who have reviewed this book have first hand experience of children with behavioural problems, or links to Aspergers and / or Autism. They have (almost entirely) commented on how this book reflects in some way their experiences or that of friends or relatives. They have almost all enjoyed the book, and having read these reviews you may feel that, if you have no such experience, the book may not appeal to you.

Well, I personally have no experience in these areas, and I can honestly say that this has gone straight into my all time top 5 reads!

The story is wonderfully crafted, and not a page goes by when you do not learn something new about Christopher, the central character who has, I understand, though it is not stated in the book, Aspergers Syndrome (the book is actually written entirely from Christophers perspective).

This is one of those rare books that makes you want to discuss (not just talk about) the story. My wife and I both read it over the same weekend, and we kept finding ourselves going back to it to talk through some of the difficulties that Christopher faced, and how it must be to have to deal with them, either as the child or as a parent. This story really gives an insight into a mind which, in some ways, is far more developed than the mind of an "ordinary" person. It also gives you a feel for what it must be like to need complete structure and order to a life which can never absolutely have both. The lack of what you and I would call "emotion" was in itself deeply moving, and several times I found myself asking how I would cope if one of my two children had the same difficulties.

This is a remarkable book. If only everyone could read it, society would become a much more understanding and accepting place for those who suffer from the effects of conditions such as Aspergers, ADHD and Autism.

Red Food = Yummy!
Novels written from the perspective of a mentally disabled protagonist are a tricky business, they can easily veer into condescension, mawkishness, or quirkiness for its own sake. Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn is a recent excellent example of a highly entertaining book which avoids these pitfalls, and this story about a 15-year-old boy with a highly functional form of autism (Asperger's syndrome) is another. Christopher lives in Swindon ("the armpit of England") with his widowed father, excels in math, can't read people's expressions, doesn't understand statements that aren't literal, and has severe color issues (for example, red foods are good, brown foods are not). The story begins when Christopher discovers his neighbor's dog dead, with a garden tool sticking out of it. Someone has clearly murdered the dog, and in the spirit of his favorite fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, he sets out to discover who the villain is. A social worker at his school helps him record his investigation in book form-thus explaining the novel. Christopher encounters inexplicable adult resistance to his desire to investigate, which by a quirk of fate, leads him to investigate his dead mother. At which point the book takes on a classic quest structure and the dead dog is left behind.

The real joy of the book is not its plot (which is skimpy and turns into a soap opera in the final third), but its nuanced portrait of the challenges faced by the mildly autistic, and by those who raise them. Christopher's sensitivity to noise, crowds, colors, and especially being touched, is shown in vivid detail (Some reviewers have criticized the character of Christopher as having many behavioral tics that would be cured in a few years therapy, however they seem to have missed the point that his father is a lower-middle class, blue-collar worker, and by inference could never hope to afford therapy.). At the same time there's no attempt to build Christopher into a figure of pity: he's clever, persistent, irritable, and sometimes irritating -a fully rounded character who simply operates in a slightly different world than most of us. The prose is very simple and direct, as one might expect from a young boy, making accessible to younger readers (although parents should be aware that there are four-letter words present). If for no other reason, the book is worth reading for the humanistic and empathetic portrayal of a mentally disabled youth, and will help any reader better understand the challenges facing those with mild autism.