Tomorrow - Damian Dibben

Every so often, a book comes along that is a little different, and it begs to be read.  I found out about this one from a short comment by a bookie friend, which was closely followed by a similar comment from another bookie friend!  Neither of them read many of the books I do and both of them read far more than me a month, but I always read their comments and sometimes a book pops up that I think "I'd like to read that!".  So this one eventually arrived through the post, and it was added to the pile of books near me for reading quite soon.

This is history observed by a dog.  The dog talks to us in human terms although humans only hear the bark, of course.  But what a tale he has for the reader.  The book is called Tomorrow - and the dog has many tomorrows to come because he is several hundred years old, and as the book opens he's in Venice on the steps of St Mark's Cathedral waiting, as he was told to do, by his master who disappeared 127 years ago.  Is he dead?  maybe, but maybe not, for if the dog is that old, some magic appears to be happening.  Suspension of belief has to be employed, but that was easy for me.  I dipped in and was hooked.  Another character in the tale thinks the dog's name is  Tomorrow, but actually, his master usually refers to him as "my champion" and really, it is not important that we know the dog's name - it is much more important that we find out why he is so old, and of course, where his master disappeared to.  

This is not a children's book.  The only group I would offer this to are those who are open-minded about book settings.  After all, this is not the mysterious death of an office worker, the mysterious disappearance of a husband and all his money, the attempted murder seen from a train. This is a wonderful adventure - from the new cathedral in Venice; the Ice Fayres on the frozen River Thames; and onwards through several hundred years of bloody European history, a time when it seemed that everyone was at war with the country next door.  Descriptions of deaths are many - some are dogs, some human;  horrific battle scenes leave nothing to the imagination, and through all of this our canine hero searches for his master.

I'd have read this all in one go, but real life does muck about with doing what you want to sometimes, but I managed to read this over 48 hours, and loved every moment of the adventure, moved to tears twice during the reading of it.  It reminded me of The Night Circus, not in it's style or narration, but because that was also a book where if you suspended belief, you could enter into a truly different realm.