A faithful sheepdog is the eponymous hero of Bob, Son of Battle: The Last Gray Dog of Kenmuir, a novel about the rivalry between two canines and their masters, and the boy who’s caught in the middle. Set in a small town in northern England, the novel was written by British author Alfred Ollivant and published in 1898. In August, the New York Review Books’ Children’s Collection will release a new hardcover edition, in which author Lydia Davis renders the original, now obscure dialects into modern English.

Although this is Davis’s initial foray into children’s literature, she has published numerous acclaimed books for adults. She is the author of seven collections of stories, including Break It Down,Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, and, most recently, Can’t and Won’t, as well as one novel, The End of the Story. HerCollected Stories were published as a single volume in 2009, and in 2013 she was awarded an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit Medal for the Short Story, as well as the Man Booker International Prize. She has also translated many books from the French, including Swann’s Way and Madame Bovary.

Davis’s desire to modernize Bob, Son of Battle (titled Owd Bob in the U.K. edition) sprang from her memories of first reading the book as a child. “The story is so convincingly told that you simply forget that it isn’t real, and even if you tell yourself it did not really happen, you believe the story, enter fully into it, and are moved by it,” she said. “I found that this continued to be true even as I was working on it. I found the ‘suspension of disbelief’ immensely effective.” More.

See: Publishers Weekly

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