The Mistress’s Dog

The Mistress’s Dog is an engaging collection of twelve short stories by David Medalie, including two award winners – ‘Recognition’ and ‘The Mistress’s Dog’ – and a Foreword and afterword by Michael Titlestad.

Deft, subtle and nuanced, Medalie’s stories show an accomplished and mature writer at his best. Their focus is the lived experience of people: ostensibly uneventful lives into which the unexpected erupts. These stories find significance in the reversals, ironies and coincidences of existence. They bring the characters – and the reader – to the brink of recognition.

The Mistress's Dog was short-listed in 2011 for the University of Johannesburg Literary Award and was awarded the Thomas Pringle Award by the English Academy of Southern Africa in 2008. It was also short-listed in 2011 for the Caine Prize for African Writing and was selected as one of the best twenty short stories of the post-apartheid period and was published in 2014, along with the other nineteen stories, in a collection entitled Twenty in 20.