The narrator is a dog. Etna is a working military dog in an unnamed country, and after years at war he walks away from the men he fought beside one night and heads for the place he was taken from as a pup, on the chance that home is still there. That’s the whole book — the walk. He crosses ground he worked during the fighting and finds it wrecked and rearranged. He meets people and animals trying to start over, and learns that peacetime isn’t safe either, just differently dangerous. Yoon writes spare and quiet, 208 pages, and never once makes the dog cute or gives him human thoughts. Reviewers keep reaching for Homer and Animal Farm.
Etna: A Novel