The Curious Incident of The Dog In The Night-Time

Writing his first novel from the point of view of an autistic 15-year-old, Mark Haddon takes the reader into the chaos of autism and creates a character of such empathy that many readers will begin to feel for the first time what it is like to live a life in which there are no filters to eliminate or order the millions of pieces of information that come to us through our senses every instant of the day. For the autistic person, most stimuli register with equal impact, and because these little pieces of information cannot usually be processed effectively, life becomes a very confusing mess of constantly competing signals. Mark Haddon is a writer and illustrator of several award-winning children's books and television screenplays. As a young man, Haddon worked with autistic individuals. He teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and at Oxford University.