Review: A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Griz's family live on an island in the Outer Hebrides, about a century after most humans have become infertile. They survive by fishing, farming and scavenging what they can from other islands and the mainland. Griz has never seen more than a handful of people.

But then a trader arrives, charms the whole family - and steals one of their dogs on the way out. Griz isn't going to stand for that. Dogs are family, after all. But the long journey over the mainland will turn the whole world upside down.


In one of those strange coincidences that often show up in publishing, this is the second book I've read recently featuring apocalypse by infertility. The Quiet at the End of the World is a quieter meditation on what being human means; this is much more action packed and covers a wider area, allowing us to see the effects a lack of humanity would have on the world more clearly. I loved the little comments here and there from Griz, wondering whether we found things strange and exciting or were just used to them - things like cars and music players.

None of the other characters really stood out for me, but they weren't the point of the book anyway. There was an excellent twist near the end, one that really took me by surprise. However, I didn't like the formatting; speech isn't marked out at all, no quotation marks or even dashes, and sometimes one character's dialogue runs straight on from another's so I had to go back and reread a couple of times to untangle it. It took me right out of the story every time; I've marked the book down a star for it. Luckily, Griz is alone for huge swathes of the story, so I was able to ignore it.

This story will stay with me for a long time.

Receiving an ARC did not affect my review in any way.


This isn't the best representation of the writing, but it's the section that has stayed with me the most.
It didn't make sense. He'd stolen her. But she wasn't on the boat. And she wasn't here. She'd have barked if she smelled me. I wondered if they'd done something terrible to her. Or had she jumped overboard and tried to swim home and drowned? Had I been so set on following the distant red sails all day that I'd missed a small and loyal dog's head in the waves as I passed it? Had she barked in relief as I got closer to her and then watched the Sweethope sail past, leaving her alone and bewildered on the wave waste as the cold took her?
All of those thoughts kept repeating in my head, images that got worse and more detailed every time they came around. And the more I tried not to think of her last moments, the closer I seemed to get to them. I could easily have missed a dog's barking in the sound of the wind. Jip could have missed her scent. As my head whirled round and round on it, I became more and more convinced. We had betrayed her. But me most of all.
It hurt like losing Joy all those years ago, worse really because that lose had not been my fault, and by the time Brand came back after what felt like an hour or more I had persuaded myself that she was dead and had died in the terrible way I had imagined.

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