It wasn't until I decided to put the dog, Spider, together with a boy, Tom, who has his own set of insecurities, that the story started to come together. I loved the comedy of it initially, the idea that an animal could be wrestling with the same insecurities that we do and that it felt trapped in the wrong body.įor a long time I thought that the dog would be jealous of the cat's life and would behave like a cat but that began to fall away - there just wasn't enough in the story. Q: Can you tell us how the first seeds of the idea for this book were sown?Ī: I was in an auditorium taking questions from the audience when a boy called out, "I have a dog", and I said, "That's nice", and he shouted back, "Not really, he wants to be a cat!". We asked author ANDY MULLIGAN to tell us more about DOG: Much of the novel is focused on Spider, the friends he makes - not all of them good - and, finally, his quest to return home. Spider becomes Tom's focus so, when Spider gets frightened and runs away, Tom does all he can to find him.
In Dog, a puppy called Spider is given to a boy, Tom, who is struggling at his new secondary school - where he is being bullied - and at home, following the separation of his parents. Mulligan also explores bullying as well as family relationships through the story. It thinks it is a cat!", it gave Andy Mulligan the spark of an idea that became his latest novel, DOG.ĭog is an exploration of the questions and insecurities around identity that children might face as they become teenagers. When a child shouted out from an auditorium, "I have a dog. He now divides his time between London and Manila. He has taught English and drama in India, Brazil, the Philippines and the UK. He then travelled extensively in Asia and later retrained as a teacher.
He worked as a theatre director for ten years before being made redundant in his early thirties when he left the UK to help at an orphanage in India. Andy Mulligan was brought up in the south of London.
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