Even the Dogs: A Novel

On a cold, quiet day between Christmas and the New Year, a man's body is found in an abandoned apartment. His friends look on, but they're dead, too. Their bodies found in squats and sheds and alleyways across the city. Victims of a bad batch of heroin, they're in the shadows, a chorus keeping vigil as the hours pass, paying their own particular homage as their friend's body is taken away, examined, investigated, and cremated. All of their stories are laid out piece by broken piece through a series of fractured narratives. We meet Robert, the deceased, the only alcoholic in a sprawling group of junkies; Danny, just back from uncomfortable holidays with family, who discovers the body and futiley searches for his other friends to share the news of Robert's death; Laura, Robert's daughter, who stumbles into the junky's life when she moves in with her father after years apart; Heather, who has her own place for the first time since she was a teenager; Mike, the Falklands War vet; and all the others. Theirs are stories of lives fallen through the cracks, hopes flaring and dying, love overwhelmed by a stronger need, and the havoc wrought by drugs, distress, and the disregard of the wider world. These invisible people live in a parallel reality, out of reach of basic creature comforts, like food and shelter. In their sudden deaths, it becomes clear, they are treated with more respect than they ever were in their short lives. Intense, exhilarating, and shot through with hope and fury, Even the Dogs is an intimate exploration of life at the edges of society--littered with love, loss, despair, and a half-glimpse of redemption.

About the Author :
Jon McGregor is the author of the critically acclaimed Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and So Many Ways to Begin. He has won the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. He was born in Bermuda in 1976, grew up in Norfolk, and now lives in Nottingham, England.

Review :
Jon McGregor might be the best chronicler I know of the way small accidents can set a life in motion, and the way what's said between people-or left unsaid-can change everything. This is a beautiful book, elegant and particular and heart wrenching. I loved it. [So Many Ways to Begin is a close reading of ordinary lives, a tender and often beautifully poetic rendering of the unremarkable...McGregor has proved once again that the unremarkable can be a story worth telling. Captivating...a keen sense of detail and a lyrical writing style. McGregor invests the human condition with a dignity which is almost painful to consider. McGregor] aims to leach all the beauty and significance from the vast space-time continuum known as the commonplace.