NewSouth is delighted to announce that it has acquired Australian publishing rights to The Lady with the Dog, a powerful and deeply moving new novella by award-winning writer Carrie Tiffany, featuring whimsical illustrations by acclaimed Sydney-based artist Noel McKenna.
The book will be published by NewSouth in Australia under an agreement brokered by literary agent Alex Christie at Curtis Brown.
The Lady with the Dog is a personal, poetic work loosely based on Tiffany’s mother’s and stepfather’s final months. It centres on a woman living with Alzheimer’s, deeply attached to the dog she’s recently adopted with her devoted but unwell husband. As the woman’s condition worsens, the dog becomes both companion and symbol, anchoring her to the world. The novella transforms real events experienced by Tiffany’s parents during Western Australia’s extended COVID lockdown into a resonant imaginative narrative of memory, love and loss.
My mother had always wanted a dog. And finally, in the last six months of their lives, my parents collected an old German Shepherd from the pound. This was during the long lockdown in Western Australia. My mother did not understand why I could not come to see her. I rang her multiple times a day. She was paranoid, despairing, furious, accusatory. It was only the dog she could speak of."
A homage to the exquisite sadness of Chekhov’s short story of the same name, The Lady with the Dog is an imaginative biography of a mother’s last months and a meditation on the role of animals in language and narrative – and how they can return us to ourselves.
Noel McKenna’s tender, playful and quietly elegiac illustration amplify the book’s themes of companionship, fragility and endurance.
The Lady with the Dog confirms Carrie Tiffany as one of Australia’s most important and fearless literary voices, offering readers a work of rare emotional clarity and grace.
The Lady with the Dog will be published by NewSouth in October 2026.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carrie Tiffany was born in West Yorkshire and grew up in Western Australia. A former park ranger, she has twenty years’ experience as a researcher, writer, editor and teacher of creative writing. She is the author of three Miles Franklin Award shortlisted novels: Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living; Mateship with Birds; and Exploded View. She has published numerous prize-winning short stories and non-fiction in journals including New Australian Writing (Beijing), Australian Book Review, Overland, Meanjin, HEAT, Penguin Summer Stories, BBC International Short Stories, Griffith Review, Best Australian Essays, and The Monthly. Carrie was the inaugural winner of the Stella Prize, and has won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, the Queensland Prize for Fiction, the Western Australian Premier’s Prize for Fiction, the Victorian Premier’s Prize for an unpublished manuscript, and the Dobbie First Book Award.
