This month, we’re reading two deeply divergent takes on displacement and the pull of home, from an unnamed country in the wake of a devastating war to modern Nigeria.

Paul Yoon (Scribner, 208 pp., $28, August 2026)

This month, we’re reading two deeply divergent takes on displacement and the pull of home, from an unnamed country in the wake of a devastating war to modern Nigeria.

Paul Yoon (Scribner, 208 pp., $28, August 2026)

As many a moviegoer leaving Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey can attest, the most powerful scene in Homer’s epic is arguably a quiet one—when Odysseus returns home to Ithaca to find that his dog, Argos, has waited for him for 20 years. Upon seeing Odysseus, who cannot greet him lest he give up his disguise, Argos dies. (It’s also potentially the first moment of sentimentality in the Western tradition.) Dogs, Homer knew, unearth layers of emotion and pathos that even tales of war and human suffering cannot always access.

In Etna, Paul Yoon has tried his hand at what Nolan has called “the ultimate dog story,” reimagining the Odyssey from a canine perspective. The result is as moving and wrenching as one might expect. The novel is narrated by an ex-military dog named Etna, who was trained by Americans fighting in an unnamed Asian country as a bomb-detection and attack canine. Although the side he fought for has technically won, the country is in ruins after four years of war. As Etna sets out to attempt to find his way back to the coast he was taken from as a pup—the only reference point he has for home—he confronts what is left of this land: rubble, starvation, desolation. Few buildings still stand. Medical aid never arrives from the West. As one of the two surviving U.S. soldiers in Etna’s unit says early on, “Yeah, we sort of made a mess of things here, didn’t we?”

Etna features the spare yet emotionally rich prose of Yoon’s earlier work, along with his preoccupations with trauma and displacement. (Reading this book, I was reminded........

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