The Curious Incident of the Book in the After-noon

A friend loaned me Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time yesterday, and I plowed through it in a couple hours while Julia napped. It's an exceptional book that passed my crude test of authorial skill: did I forget it wasn't a memoir? Yes, I did. Three minutes of Googling will reveal details about the main character, the plot, et cetera, so suffice here to say that Haddon exhibited an thrilling mastery of tone and voice. The denouement of the story was tearjerking, frankly. And the protagonist - who's not really the most likeable kid - has a facility for nice turns of phrase:

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning... And then ghosts won't be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.

You can find a good article on the book and on Haddon on the Times website. Among other curiosities, it reveals that the book "was published in separate editions with different covers for adults and children but with no text alterations." The inverse of the Harry Potter U.S. vs. U.K. arrangement.