There’s nothing quite like a puppy for luring total strangers into conversation. So discovers journalist Nick Duerden when Missy the border terrier joins the family. As energetic as “a just-lit firework”, her role is to provide him with gentle daily exercise while he recovers from the post-viral fatigue that he’s chronicled elsewhere. She’s also set to give his atrophying social skills a workout, stripping him of midlife invisibility and earning him an entrée to an unexpected new social circle at his local London park.
There he meets the likes of Pavlov, a Russian existentialist who shares his council flat with Dog, a three-legged staffie; Elizabeth, an elegant older widow and owner of grey-muzzled Betty; and Agatha, an art teacher whose grandparents came here from the Caribbean, and who is forever dressed in purple, Coco the French bulldog tucked under her arm. There’s also Lintang, an Indonesian live-in cleaner tasked with walking her employer’s tangle of pomeranians.
Full though it is of beguiling observations on human and canine nature as well as the vagaries of a mature marriage, this is a memoir whose approach to structure is decidedly doggy, tending to exist in an eternal present rather than offer anything as concrete as dates as it darts back and forth in time. It’s Lintang’s circumstances that generate an essential throughline. When one day she arrives with a split lip, a black eye and an unconvincing explanation, the park gang knows something is awry. The ensuing drama wouldn’t be out of place in the kind of cosy commercial novel that gets labelled “uplit” but Duerden’s nonfiction account is subtler, more distinctive.
It’s shaped in part by his being keener on cats than dogs. “Vibratingly magical” as he finds Missy, she is an enduring source of bafflement, sometimes vexation. There is about Duerden a hint of standoffishness, too, and if this further confirms him to be, at heart, a cat person, it also means he’s well suited to make his timely dog tale – a tale that’s ultimately about human connection and our evolving need for it – touching and funny. The community that Missy leads Duerden to may exist almost solely within the parameters of a scruffy urban green space, but despite – or even because of – its limitations, he’s able to see it as authentic and sustaining.
• People Who Like Dogs Like People Who Like Dogs by Nick Duerden is published by John Murray (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
