Book Summary and Reviews of The Dog by Joseph O'Neill

The Dog by Joseph O'Neill

The Dog

A Novel

by Joseph O'Neill

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  • Published:
  • Sep 2014, 256 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The author of the best-selling and award-winning Netherland now gives us his eagerly awaited, stunningly different new novel: a tale of alienation and heartbreak in Dubai.

Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, the hero of this novel leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange desert metropolis. In a Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-La, our protagonist struggles with his new position as the "family officer" of the capricious and very rich Batros family. And he struggles, even more helplessly, with the "doghouse," a seemingly inescapable condition of culpability in which he feels himself constantly trapped - even if he's just going to the bathroom, or reading e-mail, or scuba diving.

A comic and philosophically profound exploration of what has become of humankind's moral progress, The Dog is told with Joseph O'Neill's hallmark eloquence, empathy, and storytelling mastery. It is a brilliantly original, achingly funny fable for our globalized times.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Clever, witty, and profoundly insightful, this is a beautifully crafted narrative about a man undone by a soulless society." - Publishers Weekly

"Starred Review. Shades of Kafka and Conrad permeate O'Neill's thoughtful modern fable of exile, a sad story that comments darkly on the human condition and refuses bravely to trade on the success of Netherland. - Kirkus

This information about The Dog was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Joseph O'Neill Author Biography

Photo: (CC) Larry D. Moore

Joseph O'Neill is the author of the novels The Dog, Netherland  (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Breezes, and This Is the Life. He has also written a family history, Blood-Dark Track. He lives in New York City and teaches at Bard College.

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