The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

It's been about a year since I read Mark Haddon's novel, which was a bestseller.  My mother recently read it, and it reminded me how much I enjoyed this novel.

Part of what makes this novel so enjoyable is that it is different from your average novel.  The novel's narrator and protogonist is an autistic boy living through the break-up of his parents' marraige.  Although he's autistic, he's quite bright in some ways.  He's very good at math, for instance.  And he's very self-aware, although not perceptive about the emotional tensions carrying on among the adults in his life.  That makes some things mysterious to him that would not be mysterious to us.

And, I think another thing that helped to make this novel so popular was that it's really written as a mystery.  The "curious incident" of the title is not explained until the end of the book, and I was quite surprised when I found out who was responsible.