Our Book of the Month October 2026 is Paul Yoon’s Etna. An unforgettable novel of a working dog, Etna, who, after a devastating war, embarks on an odyssey in the hopes of returning home.
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Book of the Month October 2026
Etna by Paul Yoon
Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside and return home – to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.
Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that proves, even in peacetime, to be just as precarious as in war. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are trying to resume their lives again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such devastation?
This is a novel about the power of an idea, about never giving up and, ultimately, about finding hope in the most dire of times.
‘In barely 200 pages, Yoon hands the reader a piercing classic about survival and about the search for home and family…’ FT
‘Gorgeous…a sublimely quiet depiction of loneliness and disorientation.’ Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Trust and In the Distance
‘For all its compactness, Etna has the shape of an epic. The story draws explicit comparisons to Homer’s The Odyssey… the novel is tied deeply into both ancient literary tradition and tragically perennial concerns’ Atlantic
‘In this masterful and infinitely moving dog’s tale, Yoon shows us what great fiction can do: change the way we see the world by sharing the song of another heart. Destined to be a classic.’ Mona Awad, New York Times bestselling author of We Love You, Bunny and Rouge
‘This book is stunning. I was with it every second and it will be with me for a long time.’ Joan Silber, author of Mercy and Ideas of Heaven
‘A wonder of a novel.’ Andrew Krivak, author of Like the Appearance of Horses and The Sojourn
Also by Paul Yoon
Once The Shore
Spanning over half a century—from the years just before the Korean War to the present—the eight stories in this collection reveal an intricate and unforgettable portrait of a single island in the South Pacific. Novelistic in scope, daring in its varied environments, Once the Shore introduces a remarkable new voice in international fiction.
The Mountain
In The Mountain, award-winning and acclaimed author Paul Yoon reveals his subtle, ethereal, and strikingly observant style with six thematically linked stories, taking place across several continents and time periods and populated with characters who are connected by their traumatic pasts, newly vagrant lives, and quests for solace in their futures. Though they exist in their own distinct worlds (from a sanatorium in the Hudson Valley to an inn in the Russian far east) they are united by the struggle to reconcile their traumatic pasts in the wake of violence, big and small, spiritual and corporeal.
A morphine-addicted nurse wanders through the decimated French countryside in search of purpose; a dissatisfied wife sporadically takes a train across Spain with a much younger man in the wake of a building explosion; a lost young woman emigrates from Korea to Shanghai, where she aimlessly works in a camera sweat shop, trying fruitlessly to outrun the ghosts of her past.
If you enjoyed Book of the Month October 2026, check out 5 Sensational New Books for October 2026