Living with Freddie

“Compelling, vivid, and essential, Living with Freddie confronts the mystery of love, the nature of suffering, and the heartbreaking ways in which one may be inadvertently embedded in the other. This book should be required reading for anyone contemplating adopting a pet, or even raising a child. Please read these pages. You will come away changed.”—Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus

“A beautiful book—at once a touching memoir about loving a ‘difficult’ dog and a searching inquiry into what it is to be sentient, alive, and in hierarchical relation with other sentient living beings . . . Anna Heyward zooms in and out between the everyday and the cosmic with dizzying and delightful ease, leaving the reader feeling enlarged and enlightened.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and Either/Or

“In this extraordinary, beautifully written book, Anna Heyward places the science and history of our relationship with dogs within a deeply personal story about the joy and the pain of living with, and trying to relate to, a nonhuman animal. Living with Freddie is a stunning meditation on the bond between beasts and humans.”—Marc Bekoff, PhD, author of Dogs Demystified

“Anna Heyward writes with sublime curiosity, uncommon lucidity, and an open heart—about her dog Freddie, yes, but also about love, natural selection, and humans’ relationship with the nonhuman world. I sobbed through the final few chapters, but I couldn’t put it down. Living with Freddie is an incandescent debut.”—Carolyn Kormann, staff writer, The New Yorker