Before You Begin

Before you begin.

He is six months old, smooth-coated and golden-sorrel, an Irish terrier puppy who has never known a world wider than a copra plantation on the edge of the Solomon Sea. His name is Jerry, and his god is a man called Mister Haggin. When that god lifts him into a waiting whaleboat and carries him out to the recruiting ketch Arangi, Jerry's small, fierce, wholly devoted heart is about to be flung into a voyage of headhunters, blackbirders, shipwreck, and the long search for a master worthy of his love.

Jack London wrote Jerry of the Islands in 1917, drawing on his own cruising through the cannibal coasts of Melanesia aboard the Snark. London was already the most popular adventure writer in the world, the author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang, and here he returns to the animal mind he understood better than any writer of his age. But Jerry is no wolf of the frozen North. He is a plantation dog of the tropics, and London renders his loyalty, his courage, and his bafflement at human cruelty with a tenderness that still disarms readers a century on.

The book endures because it asks an unfashionable, unanswerable question through a dog's eyes: what makes one creature give itself, body and soul, to another? Across shipwreck and captivity, through the hands of chiefs and priests and a blind old warrior, Jerry never stops looking for the answer.

Turn the page, and meet the cast of his islands. The illustrated gallery that follows is your map to the people, the places, and the perilous blue world through which one small dog carries his unbreakable heart.