Three Wild Dogs (and the truth): A Memoir

By Markus Zusak

Harper 2025

At one point in his new book, Three Wild Dogs (and the truth), Markus Zusak, bestselling author of 2005’s The Book Thief, recalls a scene where his father notices that Zusak reading to his own little son Noah and faults himself for not doing likewise when young Markus was a boy. “You’re a better father than I ever was,” he says. “I never read to you at all.”

It prompts a passionate albeit belated response from our author:

What I neglected to remind him was that books were everywhere in our house when my siblings and I were growing up. I also marveled at my dad hearing something on the news, then looking it up in his beloved Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘Where is that place?’ or ‘When did that bloody war start again?’ he’d be muttering to himself, wandering to the bookshelf in his overalls. The thing that really made me a writer was believing the lies of fiction – being captivated by novels and living them … What helped, growing up, was knowing that someone cared enough to have books in the bedrooms, the kitchen, the living room, even if they were just lying around. Even my dad’s Reader’s Digest, which he read in the bathroom, was a signal that stories mattered.

Zusak’s father could certainly have intuited that stories matter to his son the iconic and beloved author, but Zusak’s point in recalling the moment is bittersweet: he never actually told his father these things. It’s one of a handful of little reminders lodged throughout Three Wild Dogs, the little notes of might-have-beens and missed opportunities that are the coin of all loving relationships, and they’re neatly balanced with the book’s main substance: loving relationships with people who only live for fifteen years. This is a book about Zusak’s three dogs.

The dogs are Reuben, Archer, and Frost, and many pictures of them are included amidst the author’s stories about their various manic misadventures. These were dogs filled with often uncontrollable energies, hence the book’s title, and many of their stories will be instantly familiar to readers who’ve also owned raucous or unruly dogs. Zusak’s narration includes all the little social shames that can accompany having dogs like this, the awkward park encounters, the strained relationships with acquaintances. “One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that the owners of problem dogs are most often found in the dark – the gloom of almost-morning, the longer shadows of night,” he writes. “We hide our beasts from the rest of you.”

Zusak earned his world-wide reputation as a writer of fiction, and Three Wild Dogs (and the truth) is his first work of nonfiction. It joins a long, long tradition of dog-related literature, and readers of that tradition will know its two main pillars: the narrators will learn about life from their dogs, and then, inevitably, they’ll learn about death from their dogs. It’s only in a very rare example of the genre that the narrator will remain baffled and unedified from start to finish, and it’s exceedingly rare that everybody will still be alive when the story’s over.

In this way and only this way, Zusak’s book is unexceptional. “There’s nothing like a dog,” he writes at one point. “There’s nothing like a dog who becomes both your conduit to the past and your wilderness in the present, and sometimes it bears repeating.” It does indeed bear repeating, as does that other part, which Zusak confronts very nearly perfectly:

If it’s true that our lives flash before our eyes at the moment we die, I’m sure my dogs will be in that light. More so, if they’re waiting on the other side? I’ll know I’m not in heaven, but a place just left or right of it – some purgatory of love and chaos – and to be honest, I won’t complain. I’ll crouch and clench my eyes. I’ll breathe and smell that smell.

I’ll grab those necks of fur.

Three Wild Dogs (and the truth) joins that long tradition of dog-books and glows with painful, joyful realities that every dog-person will feel in their bones. None of those dog-people should miss this book.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News