The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

This stunning book puts me in the head of a young boy with a neurodivergent way of seeing the world. I picked up this book before a cross-country flight and couldn’t stand that we landed, and I would have to stop reading for the drive home.

It immersed me in Christopher’s dilemma of trying to make sense of people. The most trivial things become massive. I was hurtled along with him for a harrowing, incredible journey. Profoundly moving!

I read this book before my daughter was diagnosed with autism, but I recognized things in the main character, Christopher, that reminded me of my daughter, Nina. His honesty and intelligence, plus his ability to infuriate his parents, certainly rang bells.

Christopher is very lovable, and I find the scenes heartbreaking when the public misunderstands his overtures of friendship–or just his honest curiosity. This rings true, though, because the public can be very judgmental of autistic people if they are viewed as being too ‘different.’ Thankfully, the book has a positive ending; in fact, the final phrase is ‘…I can… show more.

This is arguably the book that brought a modern understanding of autism into the mainstream consciousness. It’s about an autistic young man (although never labelled as such) who is perturbed by a distressing event, and the unfolding of circumstances leading up to it.

There is an oft-quoted statement: ‘If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.’ True, for sure, not every person with autism is a maths genius or bothered about certain noises, but the author does not claim this is a book about autism, nor does the author claim to have lived experience of… show more.

I love story remixes: new takes on an existing genre. This book takes a conventional mystery plotline and gives it bright new coloring thanks to the narrator’s autism.

As is often the case with neurodivergent folks, Christopher doesn’t know much about the world, but he understands himself. A quiet masterpiece. No sentimentality, thank heavens.

This is one of the best novels about autism I’ve read, even though the author and publisher insist the main character’s condition is not necessarily autism.

The author, Mark Haddon, wisely chooses to show us the world exclusively through the eyes of a teenage British boy named Christopher who is afflicted with the dark gift. Because autistic brains are always trying to figure things out, always scrutinizing and analyzing the world in our own idiosyncratic way, Haddon turns the boy’s encounter with a dead dog into a detective story.

One night, Christopher finds a neighbor’s dog dead in the yard… show more.

I taught primary school children for many years, including children with a variety of learning difficulties.

It just so happened that at the time I was reading The Curious Incident I was also teaching a young boy with autistic spectrum disorder. The main character in the novel, Christopher Boone, shared so many character traits with the boy in my class that I pictured him the whole way through.

It’s not easy to write about neurodivergent people, you have to get it right as the last thing you want to do is patronize or stereotype. In my opinion, the author did… show more.

Christopher Boone is a boy who loves mathematics. Numbers and patterns make sense to him – they don’t tell lies like people do.

When his neighbour’s dog is found dead, he decides to investigate, using pure logic like his hero Sherlock Holmes. It’s clear that Christopher is neurodiverse in some way, he’s possibly autistic, but (and I really like this about the book) no specific label is given.

This is a conscious choice by the author because there is no “typical” autistic person – as Mark Haddon says, they are as large and diverse a group as any other group… show more.

I know this probably feels like an obvious recommendation, since it’s on every list imaginable, but I love this novel.

The narrator is autistic and funny and brilliant and wonderful and heartbreaking, and you root for him from beginning to end. The ways in which he limits his life by having rules and then breaks them when he wants to solve his mystery show both how important routine can be for someone overwhelmed by life’s chaos, and also how much this character cares about the people in his life. 

I took all of our kids to see the play based… show more.

"This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. This is a murder mystery," the young narrator tells us. It begins with a brutal death by stabbing; fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone is arrested for killing Wellington, the neighbor’s poodle. Normally I don’t read murder mysteries. I don’t really care who done it – after all, the author holds all the cards and sets up the clues. Mark Haddon’s mystery is different. True, the author holds all the cards, but he tells the story through an Asperger/autistic teenager. I am… show more.

This novel has been turned into a stage play, and both formats have helped the general public to understand the experience of what it is like to grow up as autistic. Although it is fiction, it conveys how an autistic teenager can feel on the margins, experience a sense of detachment, and see the world differently from other people. It brings out the disabilities that are part of autism, such as difficulties in social relationships and sensory overload. And it brings out the strengths that are part of autism, such as remarkable attention to and memory for detail, a narrow,… show more.