The Dogs of Heaven

Summary

From the beloved author of the blockbuster, million-copies sold, A Dog’s Purpose comes a novel that is at once his most intimate and his most spiritual. A story about grief and guilt, and the understanding that forgiveness is the bravest journey we take. 

John wakes in a small, featureless house with no memory of how he got there. The refrigerator holds unlabeled meals. The books on the shelf won’t open. Outside, rows of identical homes line a silent street where no car passes and no voice carries. In the mirror, he’s aged a quarter-century. He is utterly alone. And too afraid to walk out the front door.

Then a dog appears.

Khuba is joyful, irrepressible, and has no patience with John’s hermetic existence. The dog drags John outside and into the company of a wise old man named Marvin and the patient, enigmatic Victoria, both of whom seem less interested in answering John’s questions about this strange place than in prompting him to recount what he remembers in hopes of recalling the rest.

As John turns storyteller and draws his buried past to the surface, what emerges is a tale of extraordinary love: a shy man’s improbable courtship of a woman named Zoe, a harrowing rescue of her mistreated dog Mavis, and the building of a life so precious that its loss shattered him completely.

Yet grief and guilt pull John backward at every turn. Along with the one memory he cannot face—the truth of what happened to Zoe and Mavis.