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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Beloved author and winner of The Story Prize, Paul Yoon, is back with the unforgettable story of a working dog, Etna, who, after a devastating war, embarks on an odyssey in the hopes of returning home.
Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home—to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.
Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?
This is a novel about the power of an idea, about never giving up, and ultimately a novel about finding hope in the most dire of times.
"A combat-trained dog sets out for home after a war in this magnificent novel...Not only does Yoon pull off a fresh take on well-worn Homeric themes and convincingly capture a dog's perspective, but he offers subtle and stirring insights on the nature of faith, which might not always provide salvation but can be enough to keep people (and dogs) going. The author has outdone himself." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Magnificent… an epic journey of hope…Yoon crafts yet another literary miracle, gorgeous in spare prose and dense with wrenching empathy on pages that may become saturated with tears. Amid today's exhausted desensitization, Yoon gives readers an antidote of pure emotion." —Booklist (starred review)
"Yoon's story of a military working dog attempting a treacherous journey home in the aftermath of an unnamed war rarely moves in expected ways…Yoon's fabulist shading situates the story at a nexus of grim reality and hopeful fairy tale, enlivening and devastating readers in equal measure as they watch Etna reckon with the all-too-human conclusion that one can't go home again. Yoon sidesteps the schmaltz of so many animal stories and delivers something far richer in emotion and conviction." —Library Journal (starred review)
"In this masterful and infinitely moving dog's tale, Yoon shows us what great fiction can do: change the way we see the world by sharing the song of another heart. Destined to be a classic." —Mona Awad, New York Times bestselling author of We Love You, Bunny and Rouge
"This book is stunning. I was with it every second and it will be with me for a long time." —Joan Silber, author of Mercy and Ideas of Heaven
This information about Etna was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Paul Yoon is the author of two story collections, Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and The Mountain, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year. His novel Snow Hunters won the Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, the fiction writer Laura van den Berg, and their dog, Oscar.
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