In the opening chapter, he warns: “readers of a sensitive disposition may be offended by the odd remarks about babies, cats, hygiene, poodles, and vets who insist on taking one’s temperature the old-fashioned way.”īoy proceeds to debunk widely accepted lore about canines. Photo by Patrick Guadin.Ī Dog’s Life is a bit more biting than Mayle’s other work Boy is as blunt as he is waggish. Boy gained further international fame through magazine photo shoots, as well as local notoriety for his antics.

Boy made his literary debut in Toujours Provence, Mayle’s 1991 follow-up to the best-selling A Year in Provence, both light-hearted observational chronicles of life in Provençal France. Few noted A Dog’s Life (1995), which is one of the all-time great dog books.Ī Dog’s Life, for the unfamiliar, is ostensibly the memoir of Boy, an abandoned mongrel adopted by Mayle and his wife (whom Boy astutely refers to as “the management”) not long after the couple relocated to Provence in the late 1980s.

Here are 10 of the best of these books that feature animal narrators.When British author Peter Mayle died on Thursday at age 78, every obituary mentioned A Year in Provence (1989), most referenced A Good Year (2004), and many even exhumed his sex education books from the 1970s ( Where Did I Come From? The Facts of Life Without Any Nonsense and With Illustrations). Some of these books show animal narrators living human-like lives while others focus on the world of the animals.

These narrators can cast a light on humanity in a way that a human narrator may not. And they are not just books from the viewpoints of cats and dogs - though I’m absolutely down with those books - there are books from diverse animals from polar bears to bees. But there are adult books written from the perspectives of animals, too, which thrills me.

Many classic children’s books feature animals, like the Frog and Toad series by Arnold Lobel or any books by Richard Scarry. In literature, there are books, many of them children’s or YA books, that imagine the world from the viewpoint of an animal. Would they have some great insights to impart on the world? Maybe something like slow down and enjoy the world? Or would it just be a litany of feed me, feed me, feed me? The field of animal consciousness has been exploding as previous paradigms of what it means to be human are being dissolved and we discover that diverse species can do impressive things, from using tools to recognizing themselves in a mirror - to only name a few. As a dog owner and all around animal lover, I’ve always wondered what my dog or the animals around us had to say.

A dog's life book peter mayle