The Tethered God

ALASTAIR MABBOTT, THE HERALD More than 4500 years ago, Egyptian prince Khafre watches happily as his father's body is prepared for mummification. He hated his father, and enjoys seeing him disembowelled. Flash forward to the present, and Khafre has been reincarnated as a police dog trained to sniff out explosives. While trying to get to grips with this disappointing new world, he searches back through his previous life in a bid to understand why the gods would have reincarnated him as a German Shepherd. It's an original idea, which would still be readable in lesser hands, but is elevated by Condon's narrative voice. In a book where almost every sentence is steeped in black humour, the snarky tone of an entitled princeling, trying first forge a path through his own world and then to make sense of the 21st century from the perspective of a dog, rubs up against modern sensibilities in inventive and delightful ways.