The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroe - Softcover

A voraciously original travelogue through the American century, a love letter to modernity, and a hilarious and often tender insight into the monster of celebrity. O'Hagan's portrait of Sinatra has to rate among the finest and funniest ever written ... O'Hagan has created a comic genius ... Glorious. --Evening Standard

A subtle, funny and moving study of America on the eve of one of its periods of greatest crisis ... Maf the canine savant is a shrewd observer of the modern age and of the American century, a veritable Tocqueville for our times. --John Banville, Guardian

[One of} the best novels I have read this year ... his crowded and deleriously wonderful comedy of ideas ... O'Hagan has stupendous fluency and sanity, together with a slightly surreal reliance on autobiography. --New Statesman

'Using an animal narrator is one of the oldest literary tricks, but O'Hagan gives it a delicious twist in this ingenious, witty novel ... what gives the big its bite is the omniscient wisdom of Maf.' --Daily Mail

[One of} the best novels I have read this year ... his crowded and deleriously wonderful comedy of ideas ... O'Hagan has stupendous fluency and sanity, together with a slightly surreal reliance on autobiography. --New Statesman

'Wickedly funny ... [Maf] is, in short, a hoot. And he offers a strangely, well, human perspective on his troubled, anxious mistress.' --Irish Times

[One of} the best novels I have read this year ... his crowded and deleriously wonderful comedy of ideas ... O'Hagan has stupendous fluency and sanity, together with a slightly surreal reliance on autobiography. --New Statesman

An utterly unique take on the most extraordinary period of the twentieth century, from one of Britain's most exciting literary writers. In November 1960, Frank Sinatra gave Marilyn Monroe a dog. His name was Maf. He had an instinct for the twentieth century. For politics. For psychoanalysis. For literature. For interior decoration. This is his story. Maf the dog was with Marilyn for the last two years of her life. Not only a picaresque hero himself, he was also a scholar of the adventuring rogue in literature and art, witnessing the rise of America's new liberalism, civil rights, the space race, the New York critics, and was Marilyn Monroe's constant companion. Maf was very much a real historical figure, with his license and photographs sold at auction along with Marilyn's other person affects. Through his eyes we get an insight into the life of Monroe herself, and a fascinating new angle on the most talked-about decade of recent times.