Red Dog by Louis de Bernieres

From Goodreads

Red Dog is a book by a writer in love. While passing through a town in the Australian outback, novelist Louis de Bernières discovered a statue of a dog. Intrigued, he made inquiries, and was swamped by locals with tales of a wildly charismatic creature named Tally Ho. De Bernières, author of Corelli's Mandolin, has fashioned a charming picaresque of Tally's misdeeds and misadventures, not least of which involve the animal's enormous appetite (complemented by an equally enormous flatulence). "Tally," he writes, "was the most notorious canine dustbin in the whole neighbourhood. With apparent relish he ate paper bags, sticks, dead rats, butterflies, apple peel, eggshells, used tissues and socks." De Bernières' enchantment with this "dustbin" is a reflection of a larger rapture: here is a writer who has fallen for Australia itself. He wittily captures the country's cadences, its landscape, its weakness for the (literal) underdog. --Claire Dederer

My thoughts

I was lent this book to read by a friend.  It's not a book that I'd heard about but I do have a copy of Captain Corelli's Mandolin.  I was interested to find out that this short book was a book of several short fictional stories based on a real dog that lived in Austalia known surprisingly enough as Red Dog.

I really enjoyed this quirky well written book about the antics of Red Dog and the people that he befriended along the way, I did shed an odd tear or two along the way as parts of it are quite sad.  There is a film based on the book written by De Bernieres.  8/10


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dog_%28Pilbara%29  The link tells a little more about him.