Fifteen Dogs is the second novel in André Alexis' planned five-book series, The Quincunx Cycle—each work of which is centered around the philosophical themes of faith, love, place, power, and hatred. Specifically, Fifteen Dogs tells the story of a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo. The gods have had a disagreement about whether animals could be happy if they had the same cognitive faculties as humans, so to prove their respective points, they perform an experiment in which they gift fifteen dogs in a veterinary clinic the capability to talk, think, and understand language. The dogs use their new abilities to escape and set up a social structure within a coppice of a nearby park. Each dog reacts to and uses their abilities for a different purpose. For example, one dog uses them to lead, another shrinks away from them, and one even becomes a poet. The kinship, anger, and confusion that the dogs feel concerning one another is the primary subject of the novel, and it easily segues into a broader discussion about the essences of humanity, nature, life, and knowledge. The novel is thus an apologue, a fable in which animals play the main roles and in which there exists a clear moral that is nonetheless conveyed subtly.
Alexis claims that he was inspired to write the book after watching Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Teorema: "In Teorema, a god comes down to earth, interacts with and influences a family and then leaves them, and we watch the result of that bereavement. I really, really liked that, and I wanted to re-write that story in some way. The situation that Fifteen Dogs describes, the gods influencing the dogs, was one that was particularly vivid to me because I have a love for animals, but maybe even more particularly because I have a love for animal stories." Moreover, Alexis claims that, in writing the novel and giving personality types to the dogs, he consulted his own memories with various dogs while also endowing the dogs with elements of both his own emotional experiences and those of people he knows. Alexis also has claimed that writing the novel was a deeply challenging sensual exercise, since he had to pay more attention to the idiosyncratic and complex smells of the world around him in rendering it through a dog's eyes.
The novel received a torrent of critical acclaim, and remains Alexis' most commercially successful work to date. Critics primarily praised the novel's ingenious narrative framing and complex intermingling of dense, philosophical meditation with poignant and moving emotional content. The Guardian's Jonathan Gibbs, for example, found the work to be "smart, exuberant," and entirely in defiance of expectations. The novel was also a favorite on the Canadian literary prize circuit, and it was the winner of both the 2015 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The novel was also shortlisted for a Toronto Book Award and won the Canada Reads Prize in 2017. Also in 2017, André Alexis' larger body of work earned him the U.S.'s Windham-Campbell Prize.
