Code C205

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
a novel by Mark Haddon

$12.95
Paperback

Published June 17, 2003 and already 11th on the New York Times Best Seller List with over 1 million copies sold. Rave Reviews from Oprah Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Kansas City Star
"A must read..."

For 15 year old Christopher Boone, the hero of this year's most unusual mystery novel, the entire world is a mystery. Christopher is autistic. He can't understand ordinary jokes. He can't read other people's facial expressions. When people touch him, he panics and screams. So when he stumbles on the corpse of his neighbor's dog Wellington impaled on a garden fork, it's just one more mystery that needs solving. "In a murder mystery novel," the young man tells us, with his permanently straight face, "someone has to work out who the murderer is and then catch them. It is a puzzle." Indeed.

Christopher is a fan of Sherlock Holmes, whose devotion to logic and reason are a boon to a young man who can't understand emotions, and Christopher uses the Holmes stories as a kind of User's Guide to Life. While Christopher slowly teases out the sinister story behind Wellington's murder--which involves him and his family more intimately than he at first supposes--we gradually learn what it's like to dwell in the mind of a child with a photographic memory, who knows every prime number up to 7,057, but who can't understand what a hypothetical question is. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is funny, sad and totally convincing. But is it a mystery novel at all? Or a meta-mystery? Or something entirely new? That itself is a mystery--and worth investigating.

--Time Magazine August 11, 2003