The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: A Novel (Costa Novel Award)

Mark Haddon

May 2004 · Sold by Vintage

About this eBook

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic—both poignant and funny—about a boy with autism who sets out to solve the murder of a neighbor's dog and discovers unexpected truths about himself and the world.

“Disorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect.... Suspenseful and harrowing.” —The New York Times Book Review

Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.

This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.

Ratings and reviews

This book still speaks to me from time to time. This was my beach book and was a good read for that. Moving, easy read that really separates you from your everyday life. When I describe the book to people, I'm always expressing how amazed I am at how the author put himself in this mindset. The best and worst part of the book is that I picked up on a lot of the main characters Aspergers' "ticks". An excellent book if you're a math nerd, software engineer, or any one else that may see the world in patterns.

This is one of the most original and spellbinding novels I've read in years. It is written from a perspective of an autistic teenage boy in an incredibly convincing way. The book starts as a murder-mystery, and although the murder of a dog may not sound like the most pressing crime that you need to read about, the reader is quickly drawn into the story. What makes the whole situation unique is precisely the autistic perspective of the narrator. The familiar world that we all take for granted is transformed, and the crime mystery is that much deeper due to the fact that the protagonist is striving to understand the world that he lives in on top of the facts of the crime. As the story progresses we become more and more taken by the protagonist, and manage to rediscover some of the basic truths about our own lives from a new and honest perspective.

I read this for school. It's an autistic kid writing about his life. More than half the book is random thoughts and tangents unrelated. It's all about him groaning or doing math in his head because he hates noise and people and certain colors. The plot flow is jacked. It may be a plot, but it's not a story because it's a retard that's socially awkward and tells about how he groans and hates people and certain colors. Not even a good plot despite half the book is bull s***. Do not read it it's a waste

About the author

MARK HADDON is the author of the bestselling novels The Red House and A Spot of Bother. His novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and is the basis for the Tony Award–winning play. He is the author of a collection of poetry, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea, has written and illustrated numerous children’s books, and has won awards for both his radio dramas and his television screenplays. He teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and lives in Oxford, England.