By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks.Īndré Alexis's contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness.

It is ultimately a philosophical work with multiple moments of departure for the reader to. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Andre Alexis latest offering is a novel called Fifteen Dogs. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old 'dog' ways, and those who embrace the change. Fifteen Dogs Winner of Canada Reads 2017 Winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist for the 2015 Toronto Book Awards Winner of the 2015 Rogers. I'll wager a year's servitude, answered Apollo, that animals – any animal you like – would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence.Īnd so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto veterinary clinic. I wonder, said Hermes, what it would be like if animals had human intelligence.

Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis