A buzzy debut with some Booker-heavy blurbs, including from the first Booker prize winner to serve as chair of the award, Djamel White’s All Them Dogs (Riverhead Books 2026) has been on my radar for a bit. It’s one of two releases that I anticipated would end up on my predictions list and hoped to get it read before the announcement. Luckily my hold finally came in, and I devoured the slim novel. It’s officially been added to my predictions list. (This year’s prediction list will be made only from books I have read.)
I had zero clue what this novel was about – I know the cover called to mind A Little Life, but that was about it. I was not expecting a gritty, bloody, tender, and heartbreaking gangster novel told in first person from the POV of Tony Ward, a young man who is back in Dublin after he’d fled five years ago following murdering a rival gang member. A lot has happened in five years, including the death of his mentor, the return of his half-brother, and his best friend going straight. Tony is a bit unmoored and also a bit “paro” – he is paranoid that he is being haunted and hunted by the young boy he’d killed. He wants to reestablish himself within a gang and get protection, so he becomes the enforcer for a local crime boss. There’s not a lot of protection offered, but there seems to be room for advancement.
He finds himself making ready friends with the crime boss’s daughter, Fanny, and step-son, Darren “Flute” Walsh. The way White crafts this friendship with the grimy gangster backdrop that all three friends are actively involved in is what makes the novel so tender and real. Fanny is one of my favorite characters, and the dialogue between her and Tony, with their equally biting remarks, is just fantastic. I don’t think it’s a spoiler since the cover talks about it, but Tony and Darren become violently and intimately involved.
Is this Shuggie Bain meets Wild Houses?
All them Dogs is gritty and dirty – it doesn’t shine a light on a seedy underbelly so much as drag you along as an accomplice. But where it excels is in the writing and in the tender, fragile moments that spark throughout. A large man unfolding himself from a small car and the ensuing laughter, a boy who used to want to go into fashion design, a Christmas gift with snowman wrapping paper, the smell of sausage on Christmas morning. Tony’s just a kid, and those reminders, shining from under the blood and grit and gunpowder, is why this novel makes my predictions list.
A Girl Named Tommi 