The Dog: A Novel
***A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK***
***LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014***
***PWs Best of the Year 2014***
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.
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Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, our unnamed hero leaves New York to take an unusual job in a strange desert metropolis. In Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-la, he struggles with his new position as the €œfamily officer€ of the capricious and very rich Batros family. And he struggles, even more helplessly, with the €œdoghouse,€ 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.