Flush

Virginia Woolf is renowned for such avant-garde novels as 'The Hours', 'The Waves' and her gender-swapping masterpiece, 'Orlando'. Never one to shun innovation, in 1933 she took on a new challenge: to create a completely new genre and write the world's first biography of a dog. 'Flush' tells the story of a young red cocker spaniel that becomes the pet of the celebrated poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But his new mistress suffers from constant ill health, and Flush is forced to exchange the rural life he loves for a staid, urban existence as the house-pet of an invalid. Woolf uses the anthropomorphic style of the novel to great effect, giving the reader a dog's-eye-view of humanity and its foibles, as well as musing on such larger themes as friendship and the nature of freedom.