Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

DOG

Rate this book
DOG is a poignant and unflinching exploration of the search for meaning after the wreckage of war, told through the eyes of an Israeli combat officer returning from Gaza. Haunted by trauma, he spirals into heroin addiction, finding himself among Tel Aviv’s community of misfit junkies—until a stray dog enters his life and becomes a beacon of hope, guiding him through a transformative journey marked by despair, resilience, and ultimately hope for salvation.

Beyond its deeply personal narrative, DOG offers a raw and immersive examination of PTSD’s mechanisms— how extreme stress, moral injury, and the experience of combat can rewire the brain, making a return to civilian life seem nearly impossible. With sharp social critique and profound emotional depth, the novel sheds light on invisible wounds and those who carry them, while illustrating the therapeutic power of a simple soulful connection, and how the path to redemption can be illuminated in the most unexpected of ways.

182 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 1, 2025

13 people are currently reading
46 people want to read

About the author

Yishay Ishi Ron

2 books1 follower

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
18 (43%)
4 stars
16 (39%)
3 stars
4 (9%)
2 stars
1 (2%)
1 star
2 (4%)
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
Profile Image for Kuu.
364 reviews4 followers
January 5, 2026
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

DOG is an emotional novel about combat PTSD and the things we do to stay sane (even if we might no longer seem sane to anyone else). Struggling with heroin addiction and PTSD from his time in Gaza, the narrator desperately tries to get permission for a second chance, which he thinks will happen once he is able to bend a spoon with his mind like Uri Geller. His second chance does not come in the form of a bent spoon, though, but in the shapes of Dog and Doris, who are there for him until he starts believing maybe he might deserve that.

This is not about the currently ongoing war in Gaza, but about all the previous wars in Gaza that really weren't much different. And it is about what it does to a man to kill innocents and to KNOW you killed innocents, dehumanising the enemy so much that in the end, even dogs are considered to be "Hamas dogs" and worthy of murder. It is about loss in various forms, of friends, family, and oneself, and about humanity. It's profound, sad, but also hopeful, as Geller eventually realises that he needs help and that he DESERVES help.

This novel, ultimately, shows how dehumanising others eventually dehumanises yourself, and how compassion for "lowly" beings is what may bring you back to yourself.
Profile Image for Vivacious.
90 reviews8 followers
October 6, 2025
Yishay Ishi Ron writes with vivid, precise beauty. His prose transported me straight into the dump, the coffee shop, the apartments. I loved Doris’s warmth and humour, and I adored Dog’s point of view — tender, sweet, and utterly convincing.

Yet what began as grit became, for me, relentless cruelty. I came into Dog prepared for the messy realities of trauma and war but not for repeated scenes of animal suffering. They tipped me from discomfort into anger and overshadowed the story’s depth and heart. The ending, in particular, felt designed to shock rather than to illuminate.

I appreciated the author’s attempt to explore how ego, identity, and shame can complicate healing from PTSD, but the framing of this struggle as one of “masculinity” felt narrow, especially given the context of a nation where military service is universal. Although I recognise that he was talking about his own experience, gendering his pain and recovery felt exclusionary.

Some readers won’t mind what undid the book for me. To them, I’ll say this: the author’s and translator’s craft is undeniable. The writing in Dog amazed me, even as the story left me aching.

I received a review copy of this title from Soncata Press via NetGalley.
Profile Image for Debra.
234 reviews
May 31, 2025
Translated by Yardenne Greenspan. This book is in ARC form, to be published this fall (2025). A gritty, brutal look at the impact of war on fighters; at drug abuse; and at homelessness. The main character (Barak) suffers severe PTSD as a result of his experiences in Gaza in 2013, and escapes from his terrors through drug abuse. Through a connection to a dog ("DOG") and an unhappy but generous woman (Doris), he takes his first steps towards recovery, but is then arrested for murder. This novel comes out of the author's ongoing struggles with PTSD. He was a combat soldier in an elite fighting unit. The book is quite short (about 150 pages), starting slowly, but then gathering speed towards an abrupt finish. It includes an Afterword by the author, and a list of discussion questions for book groups.
Profile Image for A B.
36 reviews2 followers
December 27, 2025
I am writing this through tears. Yishay Ishi Ron’s Dog is so touching, so human, so powerful that I can’t yet collect my thoughts properly.

What comes first to mind is Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir, the 2008 animated documentary about the 1982 Lebanon War, built from false memories, traumatic flashbacks, and the impossible work of reconstructing what the mind refuses to remember. Like Folman’s film, Dog centers on trauma, moral injury, memory, and living with the unthinkable.

Both works understand that trauma operates through dissociation—the mind protecting itself by creating distance between the self and unbearable experience.

In Waltz with Bashir, Folman discovers that his beautiful, ethereal memory of bathing nude in the Mediterranean while golden flares light the Beirut sky is false; in reality, he was part of a team shooting those flares to facilitate the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Memory, as the film’s psychologist explains, is “dynamic…alive. If some details are missing, memory fills the hole with things that never happened.”

Ron’s Geller operates in the same dissociated space. A decorated officer from an elite combat unit, he stalks Tel Aviv’s underbelly to feed his heroin addiction, living with other junkies in a squat. He is haunted by visceral memories of comrades burning alive in an armored personnel carrier during a Gaza campaign. But he also fixates on a dog, cruelly killed during combat operations, a dog whose death becomes a stand-in for all the deaths he cannot mourn directly. When a stray dog crosses his path, Geller desperately attempts to care for it despite struggling to feed himself. The dog becomes both a tether to life and a route back to buried memory.

What makes Ron’s novella extraordinary is its unflinching honesty about the moral dimensions of trauma. This is not just PTSD as medical condition, though Ron, drawing on his own experience, renders the mechanisms of extreme stress and rewiring of the brain with clinical precision. This is moral injury, the wound that comes from what one has done, not just what one has seen. Geller muses bitterly about his father, comatose in a hospital, “connected to his drip irrigation system like a hydroponic plant”: “I know that if he were conscious he’d show me the way out of drugs. Sometimes I hate him for all the poison he’d fed me over the years about the commandos, his stories about the First Lebanon War, the conquering of the Beaufort. He bottle-fed me Golani lore…I had no choice but to grow up to fill his shoes.”

Here Geller becomes a surrogate for generations of Israeli youth, raised on an idealization of militarism and self-sacrifice in pursuit of nationalist goals. The book’s most challenging passage confronts this directly: “I started crying over Yehoram and the other dead soldiers and those damn Arabs we were forced to kill when we flattened their homes with D9s and blew them up with missiles and ruined their messed-up lives.” The passive construction—“we were forced to kill”—sits uneasily against the active verbs: “flattened,” “blew them up,” “ruined.” Ron doesn’t resolve this tension. He allows Geller to mourn both his fellow soldiers and the dog killed in Gaza: “I remembered his eyes, a deep black surrounded by yellowish brown. They were the kindest eyes I’d ever seen…instead of helping him, instead of petting him and rubbing his belly and scratching behind his ears, Yuval cocked his Glock and shot him in the head, that son of a bitch, and then kicked him too, as if a bullet to the head wasn’t enough.”

The dog’s innocence, its fundamental blamelessness, makes it the only death Geller can fully grieve. This is the book’s most powerful insight: sometimes we can only approach the unbearable truth obliquely, through displacement and metaphor.

Though Dog was written before October 7, and published in Hebrew in June 2023, I couldn’t help but read Geller’s story as the story of a whole country. Not as allegory, but as a portrait of what Israeli society has experienced these past two years.

Yardenne Greenspan’s translation is fabulous. The prose forces you into Geller’s dissociated consciousness, where time collapses and Gaza bleeds into Tel Aviv and the past refuses to stay past.

Ron dedicates the book to “combatants whose eyes have seen things that their minds refuse to forget.” For that reason alone, Dog deserves the widest possible audience. But it is also simply a masterpiece of contemporary war literature, raw, compassionate, unsparing, and ultimately about the possibility of redemption through the simplest of connections: the bond between a broken man and a stray dog.

I am shattered. It was a devastating read. Time now to take a break and do some work of my own.
Profile Image for NICODESO.
30 reviews2 followers
June 18, 2025
DOG is an unfiltered story about PTSD, familial turmoil, homelessness and heroin addiction among other universal themes. It follows a former Israeli elite soldier as he descends into heroin-infused chaos after his deployment in Gaza. Struggling to reconcile with his violent past, he ends up in a moldy squat in Tel Aviv with fellow outcasts and junkies.

The book's protagonist adopts the name Geller in a nod to spoon-bending illusionist Uri Geller, and wears a spoon around his neck like a talisman. It’s a recurring motif with Geller fixated on bending the spoon with his mind much to the amusement of his fellow junkies. There's quite a bit of pathos in the interactions between the junkies.

The narrative alternates surprisingly smoothly between omniscient and a visceral, first-person voice.

DOG's stark depictions of heroin withdrawal and the inner turmoil that ensues is moving, and each time Geller craves his next fix, it brought back associations of Beautiful Drug (Thievery Corporation).

“You are the drug in my veins/ And I'm waiting to feel it again, again”

Also, Geller’s internal monologue is startlingly lucid, and his observations, even poetic at times. He befriends the eponymous adorable stray, DOG, and is then befriended by Doris, a lonely middle-aged woman who offers him unexpected kindness and shelter.

A standout moment for me is when a filthy, worn out Geller accepts a meal invitation at Doris’ home and she wastes no time cutting to the chase asking “how one goes from Commando officer to street dweller and drug user.” Geller recognizes this dynamic instantly: people welcome you into their homes, offer food, and then go hammer and tongs with questions they’d never dare ask in neutral territory. The unspoken life lesson here: be careful where you eat at, you’ll be expected to trade pieces of yourself in return for the food.

DOG ends on a redemptive note as Geller’s former commander promises that the unit will stand by him “because brothers help each other out.” Yet, a final twist leaves the reading wondering if Geller was ever a reliable narrator?

A larger question looms - can combat trauma distort ones memories to the extent of extreme disassociation and even projection?

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC copy.
50 reviews2 followers
November 2, 2025
Dog is a story about a PTSD (Post Trauma Stress Disorder) Israeli veteran who has crumpled into a homeless heroin junkie addict because of his illness. It is a short novel which vividly describes the war he experienced in Gaza as well as all the insignificant occurrences which trigger his reliving the anguish he went through as a commando soldier. The protagonist also describes explicit scenes of his heroin addiction, his need for the next fix and how it alleviates his PTSD as well as his efficiency of shooting up from his days as a combat medic where he "can find a spot with my eyes closed, from back in the days when the battalion sent me to medic training."
We are introduced to Barak (renamed Geller in his homeless environment) with some history of his life after his discharge. PTSD does not immediately affect its victims the moment of discharge. But can creep up on them as they try and reinsert themselves into a daily life. Although the narrative is repetitive, as Geller is constantly reliving his war memories from any different trigger in his daily existence, it is eye-opening and informative into how PTSD inhibits its victims from leading a 'normal' life. The novel ends on a positive note, despite the depth of trouble the Geller has encountered with the message that the step towards returning to normalcy transpire if the motivation comes from within.
This is a must read for anyone who wants an inside non-medical view of PTSD. It is a dismal account of how the institutions which push the soldiers into combat do little to administer to their needs after they are discharged.
Profile Image for Patricia.
347 reviews4 followers
June 26, 2025
I am assuming there are trigger warnings on this book, if there aren't here They are, PTSD totally screws up this guy's life with drugs. It happens to way too often to soldiers. It doesn't matter what branch of military, what country you are from. This is something that happens to everyone who sees war. It does not care what race creed or religious belief you hold dear. PTSD and drug abuse is the worst thing on the planet. That all branches of the military in all the world ignore and don't treat enough. And the way these officers gaslit, this person happens far too often, because officers are allowed to lie to you. And here, I thought they were supposed to be looking for the truth. So yeah, if you have ever been in more or suffered from addiction. Or still suffer from of addiction. This might be a little much, but it is very well written a lot of emotion, is put into every single page. The translator did a fantastic job and the narrator for the audiobook. Absolutely headed out of the park with the emotion that he put into his voice.
4 reviews
November 1, 2025
Dog - The Humanity within to survive PTSD

Yishay Ishi Ron has captured the essence of war and PTSD through a brilliantly written novel that is already a classic. When I heard a podcast interview by Danny Gordis of Ishi, I immediately associated to Adam Ben Kalev by Yoram Kaniuk where trauma lurked in every page but narrative far exceeds Kaniuk’s in describing the interior life of living with PTSD. I say this as someone who helped write the guide lines for Traumatic Stress Studies back in 2004. Kaniuk was the Shoah, Ishi is the IDF, the legal system and Gaza. He captures the pain as well as a kind of unique hopefulness and by this I don’t mean resilience which I feel is totally over estimated and seldom understood. The book explains why.
82 reviews
January 4, 2026
This short, powerful story captures the trauma and post-trauma of an elite IDF commando who has become broken down, homeless, and addicted to heroin. His tentative friendship with a caring stranger grows from their mutual affection for a sweet dog. The plot is terrifying, both in Geller’s flashbacks of wartime scenarios and his current existence in sordid settings with unsavory characters, but ends sweetly with hope for a better future. The author ties it up so well with the dog being both the symbol of his wartime separation of body and soul, and the embodiment of a guileless loyalty, often impossible to find among humans. I’m looking forward to Ron’s next work.
43 reviews1 follower
December 31, 2025
This is a very difficult book to read. i won’t go into the plot you can read the blurb, but suffice to say you are inside the head of combat soldier who becomes a heroin addict and has untreated PTSD/combat fatigue.
Profile Image for Erin Wyman.
310 reviews22 followers
July 17, 2025
This book hits hard.
Contemplative, compassion, empathy, humanity.
I am not a solider, nor a junkie- but to understand the struggle from words on the page, THAT is talent.
Profile Image for David.
1,703 reviews16 followers
November 1, 2025
Quick read with a major punch. The impact of PTSD on an IDF soldier. Author’s note says this is highly autobiographical. Tragic, from every angle. Important book, no doubt.
250 reviews10 followers
October 25, 2025
Yishay Ishi Ron’s Dog is a masterful and unflinching portrayal of the aftermath of military combat. Barak, an Israeli commando officer, faces a descent into trauma, addiction, and poverty that is both vivid and heartbreaking. His struggle to re-enter the civilian world he once knew feels nearly impossible. The depiction of Barak’s PTSD is raw and isolating, yet his unexpected compassion for a lost dog becomes a faint but vital light in his darkness.

Dog stayed with me long after I finished reading it. Ron’s characterization of Barak feels deeply authentic, drawn from lived experience. His portrayal of service in Gaza and its psychological aftermath offers readers a powerful understanding of the cost of trauma, and a quiet, enduring sense of empathy.
Profile Image for Cheryl Goot.
70 reviews
August 13, 2025
This book was fantastic! Dog by Ishay Ishi Ron is a deeply moving story that portrays PTSD with honesty and compassion. Barak, a former Israeli combat soldier, is struggling with both PTSD and drug addiction when a stray dog unexpectedly walks into his life. The bond between them is beautifully written—the dog becomes a quiet source of comfort, helping him both emotionally and socially, even leading him to meet Doris, a woman who offers him unwavering support!

What really stood out to me was how authentically the author captured the experience of living with PTSD! The emotional depth, the quiet moments of connection, and the way healing comes in unexpected forms made this such a memorable read! I loved how the stray dog wasn’t just a pet in the story, but a catalyst for change and hope!

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this novel—it’s one that will stay with me for a long time!
Profile Image for Sarah.
829 reviews1 follower
December 6, 2025
This book is short, but it packs an incredible punch in its few pages. It tells the story of a once-soldier, now-junkie, living in the prison of a PTSD-riddled mind, who is sure that if he can only accomplish one small miracle, he'll be able to change his entire life. Nothing is sugarcoated here, from the descriptions of war to the sensations of being under the influence. The third act action came as a bit of a surprise and I'm not sure I liked quite how far it went, but the final page was the biggest surprise of all and the previous moments were necessary for it. The translation was marvellous, I appreciated Ron thanking Yardenne Greenspan in his acknowledgements.
Profile Image for Alex Helm.
158 reviews81 followers
May 7, 2025
israeli iof baby killers really expect us to feel sorry for them while they are committing genocide and ethnic cleansing on video for the world to see. israel needs to be stopped
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.