Sheepdog in the City

When journalist Charlie English came home after a month in hospital — his bowel blocked by scar tissue from a childhood operation he didn't remember — he found himself thinking about the passage of time. Then he saw a video on Facebook. A litter of border collie puppies had been born on a Devon farm. Nine small, squirming lives. One had a wide white blaze on his forehead that gave him the look of a balding professor. They called him Enzo.Sheepdog in the City is the story of what happened next. In the beginning, it is a comedy, possibly farce. Border collies are working dogs, bred over centuries to manage sheep across thousands of acres of open moorland. Enzo lives in Hackney. His instincts find expression in herding squirrels, ambushing joggers, and attempting to round up primary school children in the park. Something, clearly, has to change.What changes is everything. English takes his dog north — to the Yorkshire Moors, his father's country, a landscape of burnt umber heather, Viking place names, and skies that arrive unimpeded from Siberi He competes at sheepdog trials across the north of England. He works towards a single goal: to run Enzo at Danby Show.Here too, in the valleys and on the high moors where his ancestors lived and practised medicine for over a century, he begins a different kind of reckoning. Because the Yorkshire Moors hold more than sheep and heather. They hold the story of a family: a dynasty of moorland doctors stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century, marked by emotional coldness, institutional damage, and a recurring pattern of self-destruction. And they hold the story of a father who died before his son could know him.Warm, funny, moving and richly observed — for readers of James Rebanks, Robert Macfarlane and Tim Moore — A Very Good Dog is a book for anyone who has ever loved a dog, grieved a parent, or felt pulled back to a place they can't quite call home.