'Brash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be Southeast Asia's most ambitious writer in a generation' Economist

Once, Sato Reang's father tried to bully him into being a pious child. Now he's a little Devil.

He stops saying his prayers. He starts to run with the wild boys: drinking, fighting, stealing. He eats his fill of life, barges in where he pleases. Maybe he'll burn down the school...

If only Jamal, his strictly religious schoolmate, would join him. Sato intends to lead him astray and introduce him to worldly pleasures. Even if the consequences are darker than he could have imagined.

Devilishly funny and delicately moving, The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks is a lightning strike of a coming-of-age novel.

"Brash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be Southeast Asia's most ambitious writer in a generation" - Economist

"Kurniawan flips effortlessly from first to third person, creating a fun and textured style, which blends a clear-eyed perspective with moments of visceral emotion. This brims with humor and heart" - Publishers Weekly, starred review

"A portrait of childhood that is both funny and quietly devastating... Sato's voice carries the novel forward with infectious energy, even as the shadows deepen around him" - Asian Review of Books

"--Praise for Beauty is a Wound" - --

"Exuberant, funny, crackling with energy and invention" - The Times

"Original and powerful... Maybe, who knows, the judges of the Nobel Prize could, in a few years, consider giving [Eka] the prize that Indonesia has never received" - Le Monde

"A Southeast Asian storyteller with a magnificent and effortless grasp of his material" - South China Morning Post

"Annie Tucker's skilful translation captures Kurniawan's matter-of-fact prose and black humour. Elements of the supernatural and oral storytelling combine powerfully to evoke a brutal past and some of the pivotal events that helped shape Indonesia today" - Financial Times

"Magical realism to rival that of Gabriel García Márquez" - Independent

"A literary child of Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie" - The New York Review of Books

"Scatological, scandalous, lively, beautiful and dark and messed up and fantastical. It's like One Hundred Years of Solitude kicked into another gear, with almost a punk sensibility housed within gorgeous writing-and stories coiled within stories within stories. One of the most brilliant things about the novel is how Kurniawan never loses the thread even when spinning so many tales at once" - Jeff VanderMeer

"A pensive portrait of rural anomie. ... A memorable look into a delinquent mind" - Kirkus

"An unforgettable, all-encompassing epic... This is an astounding, momentous book" - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An epic picaresque that's equal parts Canterbury Tales and Mahabharata - exuberantly excessive and captivating. Huge ambition, abundantly realized" - Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"Kurniawan's story of an undead woman had morphed into the story of modern Indonesia, an epic novel critics are more wont to compare to One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Canterbury Tales" - Sydney Morning Herald

"It's an astonishing, polyphonic epic, a melange of satire, grotesquerie, and allegory that incorporates everything from world history to local folk talks" - Brooklyn Magazine

"The final wonder of Beauty Is a Wound is how much pure liveliness and joy there is mixed up with the pain, as if the verdancy of the author's imagination was racing to cover a million corpses with fresh green tendrils" - The Saturday Paper

"A masterpiece... As invigorating, passionate and exhilarating as One Hundred Years of Solitude" - Livres Hebdo