peter young’s listopia

86) Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 2004
One of those unavoidable and widely recommended books which I somehow never got around to until now, though it was definitely worth the wait. Christopher Boone has Asperger's Syndrome, and when he discovers a neighbour's dead dog he sets out to discover who did it and why. This is really just the kick-start to a longer first-person story which journeys around Christopher's autistic complexities as he journeys across his own dysfunctional family. Mark Haddon has taken "show, don't tell" writing to the kind of imaginative visual extreme I always enjoy, but he never relies too much on the typographic innovation and illustrated content to get many valuable points across. An entertaining, compelling and very useful read indeed.