In a hard and hungry season thousands of years ago, a young wolf is turfed out of his pack and left to fend for himself among strange, clever new animals who walk on two legs, hunt with detachable claws and teeth, eat meat but wastefully discard the bones and tend fire as part of their pack.

Eventually, one of these young animals carefully approaches Wolf. He explains that he’s a human, and that his kind and Wolf’s kind aren’t so different: they hunt the same prey, they're hunted by the same predators and they need help surviving. The boy proposes a deal: Wolf will stand watch at night and alert the humans if danger approaches, and in exchange the humans will reward him with one meaty bone a day. Wolf agrees to the arrangement on a trial basis and over time grows closer to the boy, giving into an inexplicable urge to seek companionship with humans. And so, Wolf becomes dog.

In Wolf, Moon, Dog the award-winning author of The Book of Rain follows Wolf as he reincarnates through the ages, from Ancient Egypt to Alexandrian Greece to the Space Race and all the way to a dark future beset by climate change. Indeed, Wolf dies many times over, but each of his lives is uniquely meaningful, unleashing different aspects of humankind’s best friend. In Wharton's novel and fable, dogs are deeply empathetic creatures who experience a breadth of emotions and a desire for self-determination much the way we do, and who, also like us, struggle to reconcile conflicting instincts.

Dancing across genres and cultures, space and time, Wolf, Moon, Dog is as insightful about human nature as it is about canine behaviour, sure to delight dog lovers and show even readers immune to a dog's charm how much there is to learn from our canine counterparts.

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

• Read Thomas Wharton in The Globe and Mail: “I finally gave in to the urge to explore the abandoned property near my house”

• The Book of Rain and Cat Fox Neutrino have been shortlisted for the 2024 Alberta Literary Awards

• The Book of Rain is one of the five best Edmonton books of 2023

• Thomas Wharton is a finalist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize!

• Read Prairie Books NOW’s review of The Book of Rain

• Read Thomas Wharton’s climate essay “Cat Fox Neutrino” in Hazlitt

• Read Thomas Wharton’s article in The Globe and Mail on Lucid Dreaming

• ‘Dear ChatGPT: You worry me,’ wrote Thomas Wharton. Then the chatbot wrote him a poem.

• Thomas Wharton on a local TV show on his book tour 

• The librarians of Canada have chosen it as one of the best Canadian books out in March 

• Read CBC Books’ piece on The Book of Rain

• Read the Edmonton Journal’s profile on Thomas Wharton

• “Of Man and Beast” - Thomas Wharton’s novel ponders the fate of animals in a human dominated world

• The Book of Rain is #4 on the TORONTO STAR Canadian fiction bestseller list