DOG: A FABLE

a novel by Thomas Wharton

A STRANGE AND WONDROUS CHRONICLE OF THE HUMAN-CANINE BOND

Under a hard winter moon thousands of years ago, a young wolf is separated from his pack. He takes refuge with a tribe of humans, newcomers to the valley, and begins to grow closer to them as they help each other survive.

The story of the human-canine bond is well-known and well-told—but rarely from that young Wolf’s point of view. Many would be surprised to hear what he has to say about all his long years living alongside us.

From the award-winning author of The Book of Rain, DOG: A FABLE is a lyrical, gleefully genre-bending fairy tale starring Wolf, who reincarnates through the ages from the time he first teams up with humans in the Paleolithic Era to ancient Egypt to the rise of Buddhism to Regency England all the way to a dark future beset by climate change. DOG unleashes contemporary pets from clichéd notions of them and their place in our world. (Or our place in theirs?) No sentimental shaggy dog story, DOG explores the ways that humans and canines created one another and have walked together through the ages, our fates linked forever.

Dancing across genre and culture, space and time, Thomas Wharton gives a unique take on the history of dogs and humans, giving the lives and voices of dogs a gravity and independent drive rarely seen before.

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See also
thomaswharton.ca
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63,000 words
Manuscript available

RIGHTS SOLD
Canada: Random House (Fall 2025)
Italy: Libreria Pienogiorno

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK OF RAIN

“Thomas Wharton’s marvellous new novel.… The Book of Rain descends literarily from Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths”, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.… The Book of Rain is an essential text for thinking about extinction and environmental catastrophe.” – The Literary Review of Canada

“It’s difficult to describe just how audaciously imaginative The Book of Rain is. Thomas Wharton has crafted a world parallel to this one yet not, an epic of consuming scope. This is more than climate fiction for climate fiction’s sake: with beautiful literary control, Wharton ventures into the wilds, and in doing so presents a stunning excavation of how fragile, fleeting and many-faced it is to be human. I wish more books surprised me as much as this one did.” —Omar El Akkad, author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning What Strange Paradise and American War

“Thomas Wharton's novel has a prismatic effect: a reader can see rainbow refractions of Strugatsky, Joan Lindsay, Jeff Vandermeer, even Lovecraft—but The Book of Rain is unique enough to exist beyond comparison. It’s a book of rich characterizations and bold ideas, the kind of high-wire act many writers shy away from. The fact that Wharton pulls it off is a kind of miracle.”
 —Craig Davidson, author of Rust and Bone and The Saturday Night Ghost Club

ABOUT THOMAS WHARTON

Thomas Wharton has been published in Canada, the US, the UK, France, Italy, Japan, and other countries. His first novel, Icefields, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in Canada and the Caribbean and was also a 2008 CBC Canada Reads pick. His next book, Salamander, was shortlisted for the 2001 Governor-General’s Award for Fiction and was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. In 2006, Wharton's collection of stories, The Logogryph, was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His latest novel, The Book of Rain, was a finalist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize and the 2024 Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, and has sold rights in France and Russia. Thomas currently lives near Edmonton, Alberta.

Thomas on the national TV show Your Morning

Photo: Sam the dog (feat. Thomas Wharton)