The Girl With the Dogs: Penguin Special

The Girl with the Dogs is a poignantly beautiful novella about what’s really precious in life, from Miles Franklin Award-winning Anna Funder, author of All That I Am

Amid the debris of their friends’ marriages, Tess and Dan have hit the middle years relatively unscathed. But Tess senses she’s at a hinge moment, poised between the life she thought she wanted and the one she long ago decided against. The demands of her Sydney family seem unrelenting: an uneasy teenage daughter, a father who has just been placed in care, the impending sale of her childhood home. Sent to London for a conference, she’s unable to resist the pull of that relinquished life. What, she wonders, would it be like now? And might it have suited her better after all?

Deceptively concise, moving, elegant, The Girl with the Dogs was published online in 2014 under the title of Everything Precious.