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More About the Author
Product Description
Gillian Slovo
‘A compelling story of loss and of truth, simply and beautifully rendered: Wild Dogs is a gem’
Globe and Mail, Toronto
‘Reminiscent of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying’
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First Sentence
The wild dogs roam the summer fields just outside of town. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
The wild dogs roam the summer fields just outside of town. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I picked up this book because the cover grabbed my attention and once I started reading it I couldn't put it down. It is beautifully written and very unusual. There is an amazing twist half way through which I won't tell anyone about in case it spoils the book. What's it about? It's hard to say, but I suppose it's about the search for love and the wildness in all of us. About how we can't force love to happen but have to wait for it to come to us. Anyway, there are no easy ways to explain about this wonderful and complex novel. Just go and read it yourself.
Format:Paperback
This is the second of Helen Humphrey's novels that I have read and enjoyed. She writes short novels, usually less than 250 pages yet there is something about her writing that makes her stories seem so much more involved and deep.
The six strangers who come together each evening at the edge of the forest to call for their missing dogs each narrate their own story - each one of them are lonely and despairing, yet are all brought together by their missing dogs.
Failed relationships, abusive families, death and a dramatic act of violence bring the group closer together. There is an air of darkness in the story telling and a lot of mystery - things that are not revealed until almost the end of the book.
And yes, it's sad and it makes you think, but it's very enjoyable.
The six strangers who come together each evening at the edge of the forest to call for their missing dogs each narrate their own story - each one of them are lonely and despairing, yet are all brought together by their missing dogs.
Failed relationships, abusive families, death and a dramatic act of violence bring the group closer together. There is an air of darkness in the story telling and a lot of mystery - things that are not revealed until almost the end of the book.
And yes, it's sad and it makes you think, but it's very enjoyable.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
9 reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
A must read
9 Jun 2005
Format:Hardcover
I dont even know where to begin with this book. I could not put it down after i started it. Helen Humphreys presents a captivating novel about the two tragedies in life. The tragedy of gaining your hearts desire, and the tragedy of losing it. This book will compel you as you read the story of 7 people that im sure many of us can relate to as they encounter love and loss in their life.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Small novel that resonates for a long time ...
6 July 2007
Format:Paperback
This is one of the better novels I've read. The prose is so spare but each word tacitly cuts like a knife through layers of unecessary thoughts to those truly at the core of what it is to love, lose love and suffer grief. I've read 100s of books and none capture the feelings quite like Helen Humphreys can. The amazing thing too is this is done from various perspectives and vastly different people. In a few short pages, I felt I really understood each of these characters and truly cared what happened to them. In less skilful hands this would be almost an absurd story, but it is so believable, and often sad. But there is some hope in there too, about unlikely people helping each other out. It's also a surpringly good glimpse at how little we know about domestic dogs; and how close in behavior they may be to wild. Fascinating. I would give this quiet, vastly underrated novel 10 stars if I could. Be warned though, its images, thoughts and feelings stick with you well after you finish the book. It may even question how you look at love and what it does to a person.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
"Love is like... wild dogs. If it hunts you down, it will not let you go."
10 Jun 2006
Format:Hardcover
Wild Dogs is a tale of belonging, yearning and rejection, a group of people joined in a hopeless quest to recover their lost dogs, connected by that hope in a manner that lends urgency to their nightly vigil at the edge of the woods. The wild dogs symbolize impermanence, the futility of ownership, though many are fooled into believing otherwise.
Alice is lonely, vulnerable; it is through her perspective that we view the others, the enigmatic lover she enjoys for so brief a time, relinquished almost as soon as the words are spoken; the emotionally damaged painter, Malcolm, who offers Alice a temporary home; the stray boy, Jamie, battling the demons of adolescence and unhappiness at home with youthful bravado; and the helpless Lily, her innocence a terrible trap that will betray her. Time is suspended for these weeks of waiting and watching; but reality intrudes, breaking the fragile ties of friendships built on mutual need.
Alice quickly realizes the attraction between these strangers, the rebellious boy, the brain-damaged young woman, the confused artist and the research biologist: they are all afraid of the people who have the power to send their dogs into the void. It is only natural to navigate toward shared comfort, to pair up together: "Because we had all suffered the same loss, we bonded with an immediacy that I now realize was premature and foolish." Although Alice is the primary focus of the novel, the others are equally fraught with self-doubt, empathizing with the wild dogs that once were their pets, sensing some of this errant wildness in themselves. Alice falls hopelessly in love with the research biologist, fashioning a romance that may not be all that she hopes for, that leaves her desolate once more: "I lay down with dying in my bones. I lay down under the sweet, anxious sorrow of you."
Fate intervenes, shattering the bonds these strangers have forged. Relinquishing their dreams of recovery, all are changed by the actions that violate the imperturbability of the wilderness. The other characters complete this strange scenario, each leaving an imprint upon a short season of life at the edge of the woods; yet it is Alice who is most changed, embracing the future, her spirit expanded: "The heart is a wild and fugitive creature. The heart is a dog who comes home." Luan Gaines/2006.
Alice is lonely, vulnerable; it is through her perspective that we view the others, the enigmatic lover she enjoys for so brief a time, relinquished almost as soon as the words are spoken; the emotionally damaged painter, Malcolm, who offers Alice a temporary home; the stray boy, Jamie, battling the demons of adolescence and unhappiness at home with youthful bravado; and the helpless Lily, her innocence a terrible trap that will betray her. Time is suspended for these weeks of waiting and watching; but reality intrudes, breaking the fragile ties of friendships built on mutual need.
Alice quickly realizes the attraction between these strangers, the rebellious boy, the brain-damaged young woman, the confused artist and the research biologist: they are all afraid of the people who have the power to send their dogs into the void. It is only natural to navigate toward shared comfort, to pair up together: "Because we had all suffered the same loss, we bonded with an immediacy that I now realize was premature and foolish." Although Alice is the primary focus of the novel, the others are equally fraught with self-doubt, empathizing with the wild dogs that once were their pets, sensing some of this errant wildness in themselves. Alice falls hopelessly in love with the research biologist, fashioning a romance that may not be all that she hopes for, that leaves her desolate once more: "I lay down with dying in my bones. I lay down under the sweet, anxious sorrow of you."
Fate intervenes, shattering the bonds these strangers have forged. Relinquishing their dreams of recovery, all are changed by the actions that violate the imperturbability of the wilderness. The other characters complete this strange scenario, each leaving an imprint upon a short season of life at the edge of the woods; yet it is Alice who is most changed, embracing the future, her spirit expanded: "The heart is a wild and fugitive creature. The heart is a dog who comes home." Luan Gaines/2006.
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