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Summary
Summary
The beloved best-selling story of an elderly man mourning the death of his wife and the mysterious white dog who helps ease his grief. From author Terry Kay.
"A deftly shaped and vivid book...a tender and bracing tale of an octogenarian fighting to live a connected and purposeful life." ― The New York Times
"A hauntingly beautiful story about love, family and relationships...I found it all such a moving experience, a lovely enduring tribute to love." ―The Most Reverend Desmond M. Tutu
"Terry Kay is a perfect writer for those who love to read. His prose contains music and passion and fire. His work is tender and heartbreaking and memorable." ―Pat Conroy, New York Times best-selling author
The elderly Sam Peek is still mourning the death of his beloved wife when a mysterious white dog appears. Seen only by Sam, White Dog becomes a part of Sam's grief. Though it's unclear if White Dog is real or phantom, the creature eases Sam's sorrow, brings him closer to his family, and helps him reconcile with his own mortality.
best-selling author Terry Kay brings Northeast Georgia to life through his elegant prose, and the thought-provoking themes of family, love, and loss will make readers come back to this touching story again and again.
Also an Emmy Award-winning Hallmark Hall of Fame movie starring Hume Cronyn and Academy Award-winner Jessica Tandy.
Author Notes
Terry Kay was born February 10, 1938 in Royston, Georgia. He grew up there and became a well-known novelist. Perhaps his most well-known book is To Dance with the White Dog, which was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie starring Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in 1983. He is also the author of such best-selling works as Dark Thirty, Shadow Song, After Eli, and The Runaway, which was adapted for the screen. He won an Emmy for his screenplay Run Down the Rabbit. Kay's novel The Valley of Light won the 2004 Townsend Prize for Fiction and was also adapted for the screen. He won the 1981 Georgia Author of the Year Award for After Eli, and the Southeastern Library Association named him Outstanding Author of the Year in 1991 for To Dance with the White Dog. He published The Book of Marie in 2007. His last book, The Forever Wish of Middy Sweet, was published in August 2020. Terry Kay died on December 12, 2020 at the age of 82.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
A powerful--if occasionally programmatic--mythic narrative about a man who loses his wife and lives through years of grieving with the help of a mysterious white dog. Sam Peek, ""one of the smartest men in the South when it comes to trees,"" is a journal-keeper, and the novel sometimes uses his entries to good effect to accentuate his emotional tone: ""Today my wife died. We were married 57 years."" His loving family cares for him, but they also discuss him in his presence, as though he weren't aware of it, in ""sad, worried voices"" (""Old man that he is, what's to become of him?""). Slowly, however, he's left to himself, and for company a white dog appears. Sam's children, of course, assume he's hallucinating, but as the story deepens they begin to glimpse the dog. The details of his everydayness--a round of chores and errands, of Bible-reading and radio programs--are contrasted with the mythic sense of the white dog. As the daughters ""talk constantly to one another over the phone about their father,"" Sam goes into and out of the hospital, watches the dog race him to his wife's grave at the cemetery, and finally goes off in his track with the dog for a ""reunion"" to the place where he proposed to his wife. He gets lost, naturally, and the family is beside themselves, fearing violence, searching everywhere; but Sam, asleep in his track, is found by a preacher who believes in ""divine accidents, or interventions."" Sam returns home, develops an interest in genealogy, and slowly dies of cancer. When his daughters move in to help him through his last days, the dog disappears, and shows up again only (via pawprints Sam's son sees) on the grave Sam finally shares with his wife. An austere yet vivid effort--Kay's fourth (Dark Thirty, 1984; After Eli, 1981, etc.)--that manages to texture a plethora of everyday details with a kind of subtle, supernatural resonance. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.