Belka, Why Don't You Bark?

About

The history of the twentieth century, told through dogs. Starting in 1943 when Japanese troops abandon four military dogs on the Aleutian island of Kiska, Hideo Furukawa traces canine bloodlines across decades of geopolitical upheaval — Cold War espionage, the drug trade, revolutionary movements — while a girl named Strelka, kidnapped from a yakuza family, develops a psychic bond with dogs that makes her something more than human. Furukawa writes with manic, genre-defying energy — part war epic, part psychedelic thriller, part animal consciousness experiment. The dogs gradually discover their own agency, and in doing so reveal something uncomfortable about the humans who bred them as tools. Belka, Why Don't You Bark? is the most ambitious dog novel ever written — and possibly the strangest book about the Cold War you'll ever read.