Sissy, meanwhile, is a sweet-natured spaniel who “looked yearningly into Jonathan’s face as if searching for the key to her future … I’m hungry, I need more love, we’re bored here all day, please turn over the reins of your life so we can sort you out.”

Dante is a hyper-intelligent border collie living in a city where even the availability of liver cookies from specialist dog bakeries cannot disguise the fact that Manhattan is possibly the most inappropriate place on earth for a hyper-intelligent border collie to live. Rosoff animates these animals with a sense of personality that any dog-owner should recognise. They weren’t even his dogs.” Home is a sublet single-bed apartment in New York’s Lower East Side the dogs belong to Jonathan’s brother, who has flitted off to fulfil an engineering contract in Dubai. The book commences with one of Rosoff’s great, attention-grabbing opening lines: “Jonathan came home from work one day to find the dogs talking about him. At least, it is the first book in which the principal character has progressed beyond his teens though whether this means he has successfully completed his adolescence remains theoretical. What is more unexpected is that it should also be her first work of fiction aimed at an adult readership.

It’s a disappointing conclusion to a frequently thoughtful comedy by an author whose accolades include the Printz Award and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize.It was always on the cards, therefore, that Rosoff – whose biography includes mention of two lurchers – would one day write a novel about dogs.

The plot’s resolution depends on heavy-handed coincidences and canine antics. As he nurses crushes on other people and ignores repeated warnings not to marry Julie, Jonathan becomes an ineffectual, unconvincing protagonist. But after their engagement, incited by the offer of a free, live-streamed wedding to help promote Bridal-360, it’s clear to everyone-including Jonathan’s best friend, parents, coworkers, and subconscious-that the wedding is a mistake. Rosoff casts them as a plausible odd couple: he’s a nervy art school grad, and she’s a sensible salesperson. The book veers into wicked satire when Jonathan starts at Comrade, an advertising agency where everyone is “young, attractive, fashionable, underpaid, exploited, and full of existential rage.” Jonathan’s longtime girlfriend, Julie Cormorant, meanwhile, works at Bridal-360 magazine. When Jonathan’s brother asks him to look after his border collie, Dante, and spaniel, Sissy, the pets give Jonathan purpose, and Rosoff ( How I Live Now) is memorably funny on the foibles of dog owners. Rosoff’s buoyant, witty, but less than satisfying seventh novel follows Jonathan Trefoil’s fumbling attempts at adulthood in Manhattan.

Jonathan unleashed by meg rosoff