The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Christopher John Francis Boone, 15 years old boy, genius in math but has so little understanding of human emotion. He knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but cannot stand to be touched. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. He has Asperger syndrom.

His everyday life runs in order, routinity and predictability, sheltering him from messy unlogic world he hardly understand. Then one day this became upside down when he found a neighbour's dog died impaled on a garden fork. This when the story begin.

Christopher decides that he will track down the real killer and turns to his favorite fictional character, the impeccably logical Sherlock Holmes, for inspiration. But the investigation leads him down some unexpected paths. It also required him to go beyond his small safe world when he found out the secret about his mother and feels he cannot trust his father anymore. As he tries to deal with the crisis within his own family, we are drawn into the workings of Christopher’s mind.

Using the simple subject-verb-object sentence pattern in which Christopher tries to order and communicate with his world, Haddon tells his story with warmth and often humor, making us see and understand Christopher's problems at the same time that we experience everyone else's frustrations in dealing with him. All Christopher's conversations and the events he experiences are recalled from his own point of view, and the reader can easily see how difficult his world is, both for him and for those around him. During the journey of this book we can see how Christopher grows to face this overwhelming world. While the book's story and point of view are matters of commendatory, the chapter of this book is also add an uniquness, it count only in prime numbers -- so Christopher!! ;)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a comedy, a heartbreaker, a mystery story, a novel of exceptional literary merit that is great fun to read. It has won both the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the overall winner in 2004.

The writer, Mark Haddon teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and at Oxford University. As a young man, Haddon worked with autistic individuals. He is a writer and illustrator of several award-winning children's books and television screenplays.

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