A wise, wry gorgeous book about two border terriers—by the keenly intelligent, winning writer who lost her heart to them.

“I fell in love with a prideful, tense bundle of muscle and sinew that stood seventeen inches high. You would see a small brown dog; I saw perfection.”

So begins the story of Kate Jennings’s unexpected love affair with two border terriers, first Stanley, then a few years later, Sophie. A fiercely intelligent writer, an astute observer of people and her surroundings, a recent widow not ready to face her grief, an irascible Australian with no time for indulgent New Yorkers and their pampered pets, Jennings falls hard.

Swept off her feet and surprised by the depth of her love, Jennings’s life is suddenly overtaken by Stanley and when she is seduced into getting him a companion, by the pair of them.

First and foremost, Stanley and Sophie is a book about animals, but it is also about grief and grieving—for Jennings’s husband, for the city after 9/11, for the world. And it is a book about the way two rivalrous, demanding, idiosyncratic, exhilarating dogs gave Jennings daily purpose and showed her the way to her own heart.