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Reuben and Archer

A shaggy-dog story
by
November 2024, no. 470

Three Wild Dogs and the Truth by Markus Zusak

Picador, $36.99 hb, 223 pp

Reuben and Archer

A shaggy-dog story
by
November 2024, no. 470

Dogs have long been a feature of Markus Zusak’s fiction. His pre-fame trilogy of Young Adult novels, centring on brothers Cameron and Ruben Wolfe and their family, deployed the animal as a metaphor for tenaciousness. In the trilogy’s final book, When Dogs Cry (2001), Cameron and Ruben all but adopt Miffy, a Pomeranian whose scrappiness matches that of the brothers and whose death provides the book’s emotional fulcrum. There is a caffeinated hound in The Messenger (2002) and a clothesline-obsessed border collie in Bridge of Clay (2018). Even when, as in Zusak’s best-known work, The Book Thief (2006), dogs are not present, something about the way the author sees them – lovably rambunctious, all rough edges, chaos and, yes, doggedness – permeates the spirit of his two-legged characters.

Three Wild Dogs and the Truth

Three Wild Dogs and the Truth

by Markus Zusak

Picador, $36.99 hb, 223 pp

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