The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and the capital cities. And every prime number up to 7507.

Christopher, fifteen years old, stands beside Mrs Shears's dead dog. It has been speared with a garden fork, it is seven minutes after midnight, and Christopher is under suspicion. He records each fact in the book he is writing to solve the mystery of who murdered Wellington. He has an extraordinary brain and is exceptional at maths, but he is ill-equipped to interpret everyday life. He has never ventured alone beyond the end of his road, he detests being touched and he distrusts strangers. But Christopher's detective work, forbidden by his father, takes him on a frightening journey that turns his world upside-down.

Simon Stephens's adaptation of Mark Haddon's bestselling, award-winning novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time offers a richly theatrical exploration of this touching and bleakly humorous tale.

This edition contains some strong language and may not be suitable for all school curricula. Other editions are available.

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

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Overview

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781408173367
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	08/23/2012
Series:	Modern Plays
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	253 KB

About the Author

Mark Haddon's work as an author includes A Spot of Bother, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Real Porky Philips, Agent Z and Titch Johnson - Almost World Champion. His work for television includes Coming Down the Mountain, Fungus the Bogeyman and Microsoap. Polar Bears (2010) was Mark Haddon's first work for the theatre.

Simon Stephens has been the recipient of both the Pearson Award for Best New Play 2001-2 for his play Port, and the Olivier Award for Best New Play 2005 for On the Shore of the Wide World. His recent plays include Harper Regan (National Theatre), Punk Rock (Lyric Hammersmith/Royal Exchange, Manchester), Pornography (Traverse and Birmingham Rep), Wastwater (Royal Court and Wiener Festwochen), The Trial of Ubu (Hampstead Theatre) and Three Kingdoms (Lyric Hammersmith).
Simon Stephens began his theatrical career in the literary department of the Royal Court Theatre, where he ran its Young Writers' Programme. His plays for theatre include Bluebird (Royal Court Theatre) Herons (Royal Court Theatre, 2001); Port (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 2002); One Minute (Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, 2003 and Bush Theatre, London, 2004); Christmas (Bush Theatre, 2004); Country Music (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 2004); On the Shore of the Wide World (Royal Exchange Theatre and National Theatre, London, 2005); Motortown (Royal Court Theatre Downstairs, 2006); Pornography (Tricycle Theatre, London, 2009); Harper Regan (National Theatre, 2008); Sea Wall (Bush Theatre, 2009); Heaven (Traverse Theatre, 2009); Punk Rock (Lyric Hammersmith, London, 2009); The Trial of Ubu (Essen Schauspielhaus/Toneelgroep Amsterdam, 2010); A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky (co-written with David Eldridge and Robert Holman; Lyric Hammersmith, London, 2010); Wastwater (Royal Court Theatre Downstairs, 2011); Morning (Lyric Hammersmith, 2012); an adaptation of A Doll's House (Young Vic, 2012); an adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (National Theatre, 2012); Blindsided (Royal Exchange, 2014); and Birdland (Royal Court, 2014). His radio plays include Five Letters Home to Elizabeth (BBC Radio 4, 2001) and Digging (BBC Radio 4, 2003). Awards include the Pearson Award for Best New Play, 2001, for Port; Olivier Award for Best New Play for On the Shore of the Wide World, 2005; and for Motortown German critics in Theater Heute's annual poll voted him Best Foreign Playwright, 2007. His adaptation of Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Play.

What People are Saying About This

Myla Goldberg

The Curious Incident brims with imagination, empathy, and vision -- plus it's a lot of fun to read.

From the Publisher

“The book gave me that rare, greedy feeling of: this is so good I want to read it all at once but I mustn’t or it will be over too soon. Haddon pulls off something extraordinary . . .” — The Observer

“Always surprising and often hilarious.” — The Globe and Mail

“One of the most affecting things I’ve read in years . . . it’s brilliant.” — The Guardian

“Mark Haddon’s new novel comes with glowing endorsements from Ian McEwan and Oliver Sacks . . . For once, the pundits speak the truth.” — The Economist

“A stark, funny and original first novel . . . [with] one of the strangest and most convincing characters in recent fiction.” — The New York Times Book Review

“A brilliant autism novel has been overdue — and this is it! The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Mark Haddon shows great insight into the autistic mind, and he brings his young narrator protagonist quite wonderfully to life. I found it very moving, very plausible — and very funny.” — Oliver Sacks, author of Uncle Tungsten

"I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon's funny and agonizingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you won’t want to lend yours out." — Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha

“The Curious Incident brims with imagination, empathy, and vision — plus it's a lot of fun to read.” — Myla Goldberg, author of Bee Season

“Mark Haddon’s portrayal of an emotionally disassociated mind is a superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy.” — Ian McEwan, author of Atonement

Ian McEwan

Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy.

Dave Barry

It's an astounding book.

Arthur Golden

I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon's funny and agonizingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you wonpt want to lend yours out.

Reading Group Guide

Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. Although gifted with a superbly logical brain, Christopher is autistic. Everyday interactions and admonishments have little meaning for him. Routine, order and predictability shelter him from the messy, wider world. Then, at fifteen, Christopher’s carefully constructed world falls apart when he finds his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork, and he is initially blamed for the killing.

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 and ultimately brings him face to face with the dissolution of his parents’ marriage. As he tries to deal with the crisis within his own family, we are drawn into the workings of Christopher’s mind.

And herein lies the key to the brilliance of Mark Haddon’s choice of narrator: The most wrenching of emotional moments are chronicled by a boy who cannot fathom emotion. The effect is dazzling, making for a novel that is deeply funny, poignant, and fascinating in its portrayal of a person whose curse and blessing is a mind that perceives the world literally.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is one of the freshest debuts in years: a comedy, a heartbreaker, a mystery story, a novel of exceptional literary merit that is great fun to read.

1. How do you think this novel bridges the gap between literature for adults and children?

2. What do you think Haddon's illustrations add to the story and to our understanding of Christopher's character?

3. Although seemingly ill equipped as the narrator of a book, Christopher's character succeeds in eliciting a wide range of emotions in the reader. How do you think Haddon uses his protagonists voice to touch his audience in such a way?

4. Discuss the relationship between father and son in the novel. How well do you think Christopher's father copes with his son's condition?

5. The author has used his extensive knowledge of Asperger's syndrome to allow us to see the world through Christopher's eyes, how do you think the story further enhances our attachment to the character and our enjoyment of the book in general?

6. How far do you think the author has used Christopher's alienating condition to expose intricate truths about our modern lives? Do you think this was his intention in Christopher's exposure of his parent's secret?

From the B&N Reads Blog

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Editorial Reviews

The fifteen-year-old narrator of this ostensible murder mystery is even more emotionally remote than the typical crime-fiction shamus: he is autistic, prone to fall silent for weeks at a time and unable to imagine the interior lives of others. This might seem a serious handicap for a detective, but when Christopher stumbles on the dead body of his neighbor's poodle, impaled by a pitchfork, he decides to investigate. Christopher understands dogs, whose moods are as circumscribed as his own ("happy, sad, cross and concentrating"), but he's deaf to the nuances of people, and doesn't realize until too late that the clues point toward his own house and a more devastating mystery. This original and affecting novel is a triumph of empathy; whether describing Christopher's favorite dream (of a virus depopulating the planet) or his vision of the universe collapsing in a thunder of stars, the author makes his hero's severely limited world a thrilling place to be.

The New Yorker

Mark Haddon's stark, funny and original first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is presented as a detective story. But it eschews most of the furnishings of high-literary enterprise as well as the conventions of genre, disorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect. — Jay McInerney

NY Times Sunday Book Review

… Incident meticulously imagines the frustrations of an autistic's world, where sensory intake is heightened but the capacity to process information diminished. The hero's brain chemistry is the book's best safeguard against cuteness. He keeps his distance because he has no other option, an unwitting hardass to the end.

The Village Voice

The essence of good writing is a sort of cataloguing, if you will, with the author supplying the details of the world he wants to evoke and the reader supplying the nuances of interpretation. Thanks to the brilliance of Haddon's prose, this back-and-forth works extremely well in The Curious Incident … In this striking first novel, Mark Haddon is both clever and observant, and the effect is vastly affecting. — Nani Power

The Washington Post

Haddon's book is a bit like watching a DVD with a commentary track. There is the story that Christopher relates as he understands it alongside the story that he doesn't fully grasp. His favorite book is The Hound of the Baskervilles -- that's where the title comes from -- and he's aware of the demands of the mystery genre. One ongoing device is his comically self-conscious deployment of hard-boiled police procedural phrases, as when he notes of a suspect, "I might have more evidence against him, or be able to Exclude Him From My Investigation." — Tom Peyser

The Los Angeles Times

In choosing to make Christopher his narrator, Mr. Haddon has deliberately created a story defined and limited by his hero's very logical, literal-minded point of view. The result is a minimalistic narrative -- not unlike a Raymond Carver story in its refusal to speculate, impute motive or perform emotional embroidery. — Michiko Kakutani

The New York Times

The Curious Incident brims with imagination, empathy, and vision -- plus it's a lot of fun to read.
—author of Bee Season

Myla Goldberg

I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon's funny and agonizingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you wonpt want to lend yours out.
—author of Memoirs of a Geisha

Arthur Golden

Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy.
—author of Atonement and Amsterdam

Ian McEwan

Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who's also a math genius. Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor's dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he "would like to read himself"-and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears's dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can't stand to be touched-any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what's going to happen next). Christopher's father bails him out but forbids his doing any more "detecting" about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother's "death," his father's own part in it-and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds-his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced "maths" in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly. A kind of HoldenCaulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash. Film rights to Hey Day, with Brad Grey & Brad Pitt for Warner Bros. Agent: Clare Alexander/Gillon Aitken

Kirkus Reviews

. . . storytelling that is tender, dynamic, amusing and awe-inspiring - often all at once.” —The Times

“Simon Stephen's adaptation remains high tech and high quality.” —Time Out London

“. . . the best new play in town.” —Sunday Express

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About the Author

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