Winner of the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist for the 2015 Toronto Book Awards Winner of the 2015 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize "[Alexis] devises an inventive romp through the nature of humanity in this beautiful, entertaining read … A clever exploration of our essence, communication, and how our societies are organized." – Kirkus Reviews "This might be the best set-up of the spring." – The Globe & Mail "André Alexis has established himself as one of our preeminent voices." – Toronto Star — I wonder, said Hermes, what it would be like if animals had human intelligence. — I'll wager a year's servitude, answered Apollo, that animals – any animal you like – would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence. And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto vet­erinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old 'dog' ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks. André Alexis's contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks. André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His other previous books include Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid & the Wolf and, most recently, Pastoral, which was also nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and was named a Globe and Mail Top 100 book of 2014.

Fifteen Dogs is not a very ambitious book, but it hits its targets. Not everyone in NUBClub read it (hearing that it's about how dogs die was a turn-off to some of us), but those that did were pleasantly surprised by the quality of it. The storyworld here is simple but powerful -- Apollo and Hermes are gods on Earth, and make a bet about whether any dog given human intelligence will die happy and then gift fifteen dogs in a shelter that ability to see the results. Alexis does a good job creating the society of the dogs and pulling it to smart conclusions. In particular, the powerful conflict in the pack and the questions about what life is best make a interesting plot. This leads to some more predictable places, for example having an artist (in this case, a poet) as one weird dogs obsessed with language or diving hard into how an intelligent dog understands its love to its human companions, but even in these cases, Alexis brings some good writing and interesting insights. The meditation on what love is for one dog is powerful and moving and that alone is worth reading about. Of course, none of the concepts are that revolutionary. You'll see coming the fact that the dogs can't go back to their innocent times, that trust and betrayal become issues with intelligence, and that art redeems. We honestly felt that the treatment of the gods as immortal things that craze some kind of mortality and change was the best choice of the book and every scene with Apollo and Hermes sang. Overall, the book does better than you expect it to given its premise. Where an apologue like this could have be trite or childish or cheesy, Alexis both makes bolder choices that you guessed and executes the scenes of the more predictable ones more deftly than you feared. It's worth a read if you want something light and enjoyable that doesn't need to be profoundly original.