The Lost Dog — Michelle de Kretser

Title: The Lost Dog
Author: Michelle de Kretser
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 978-1-74175-606-7
Binding: Softcover

Longlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Winner of the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award Book of the Year.

Condition: Good second-hand condition. Light shelf wear and minor edge wear to covers with clean pages and a solid binding.

Set between contemporary Australia and memories of India, The Lost Dog is a richly layered literary novel blending mystery, memory, migration, art, love, and exile.

Tom Loxley retreats to a remote bush shack to finish writing a book on Henry James when his beloved dog disappears. What begins as a search gradually unfolds into something far deeper — a meditation on displacement, identity, loneliness, history, and the uneasy relationship between civilisation and the wild.

Michelle de Kretser writes with remarkable precision and atmosphere, moving between landscapes, time periods, and emotional states with quiet elegance. The novel balances intellectual depth with emotional warmth, combining literary sophistication with an almost dreamlike sense of tension and longing.

Widely regarded as one of the major Australian literary novels of the 2000s.