Book Number Six: Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor

(First published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury in 2010)

Oh, this is such a good novel!

I love Jon McGregor’s work. I love his descriptions and the way he gets to the heart of small, everyday things and unpicks them so that they open up like a flower. I love the way that he brings us a thousand small insights that make a greater whole.

But this book, this is so different from his other work. Its subject matter is perhaps what you might call darker (a community of people immersed in a culture where drugs and homelessness and marginalization are the norm) but the book just fizzes with energy and love. Here are characters we can engage with, here is urgency in living life even though the story centres around a man’s body lying in a ruined flat.

Read it! I think you absolutely need to…