Ackerley writes about his German shepherd, Tulip — based on his real dog Queenie — with obsessive devotion, comic precision, and an almost scandalous willingness to describe the bodily, inconvenient, embarrassing, noble, disgusting, ecstatic facts of sharing life with an animal.

The result is a memoir, a love story, a behavioural study, and most of all a very funny social document about a lonely literary man trying to understand a creature he adores but cannot quite humanise. Tulip is difficult, sexual, wilful, smelly, alarming, loyal, magnificent, and entirely herself. Ackerley’s prose is dry, elegant and unsparing, which makes the tenderness sharper. 

A strong one for readers of animal writing, queer literary memoir, NYRB Classics, eccentric British prose, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Sybille Bedford-ish sharpness, and anyone who understands that the animal you love is not there to improve your personality, but may reveal it with terrifying accuracy.

New York Review Books paperback edition, with introduction by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. First published in Great Britain by Secker & Warburg in 1956. Good second-hand condition, light handling and shelfwear.