Novelist Michelle de Kretser (The Hamilton Case), who lives in Australia, focuses her third novel (which won both the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and Book of the Year in her home country) on Indian-Australian professor Tom Loxley, who is completing a book on Henry James but is preoccupied with the disappearance of his beloved dog and the pressing infirmities of his aging mother. Nelly Zhang, an artist and new acquaintance, helps Tom search, but he is suspicious of her, adding a frisson of suspense to this story. The author describes her story of immigrant Tom and his beloved missing dog as “a novel about loss and being haunted by what is not there and what has been left behind.”
Reading
The Lost Dog
Novelist Michelle de Kretser (The Hamilton Case), who lives in Australia, focuses her third novel (which won both the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and Book of the Year in her home country) on Indian-Australian professor Tom Loxley, who is completing a book on Henry James but is preoccupied with the disappearance of his beloved dog and the pressing infirmities of his aging mother. Nelly Zhang, an artist and new acquaintance, helps Tom search, but he is suspicious of her, adding a frisson of suspense to this story. The author describes her story of immigrant Tom and his beloved missing dog as “a novel about loss and being haunted by what is not there and what has been left behind.”