Fifteen Dogs

Greek gods Hermes and Apollo, while drinking in a bar in Toronto, decide to give human intelligence and language to fifteen dogs in a veterinary clinic. The dogs escape and form their own society, with their own rules and speech, and each dog tells his or her own story as each struggles with these new-found abilities. This award-winning Canadian novel would be useful as a classroom novel for grade 12 English classes and could launch discussion of death, love, friendship, creation of language, and identity. Students can also identify the problems that human and the dogs’ society share, including unethical behaviour and violence.