Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (Paperback)

This powerful and brilliant book is an essential guide to the new Millennium. Straw Dogs challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions. Who are we, and why are we here? John Gray's answers will shock most of us deeply. This is the most exhilarating book I have read since Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene - J. G. Ballard

My book of the year was Straw Dogs. I read it once, I read it twice and took notes. I arranged to meet its author so I could publicize the book - I thought it that good ... a devastating critique of liberal humanism, and all of it set out in easy-to-digest (although hard-to-swallow) apercus - Will Self, New Statesman

One of the most important books published this year, and will probably prove to be one of the most important this century ... nobody can hope to understand the times in which we live unless they have read Straw Dogs - Sue Corrigan, Mail on Sunday

There is unlikely to be a more provocative or more compelling book published this year than Straw Dogs ... Gray is one of the most consistently interesting and unpredictable thinkers in Britain - Jason Cowley, Observer

Relentless in its upheaval of the ideology and moral framework most of us inhabit like a big comfy armchair. Progress, freedom, selfhood, morality, justice and technology - all are turned around so you doubt which direction you are going, if any. - Marcus Coates, Frieze

A complex and concentrated read - Hugh Lawson Tancred, Spectator

John Gray's pessimistic but challenging view of humankind among the animals, Straw Dogs enraged and engaged me more than any other book this year - Jim Crace, Times

Gray is undeniably a force to be reckoned with.He is the most lucid and compelling writer about political theory since Isaiah Berlin, and he was understandably hailed by Will Self as "the most important living philosopher - Johann Hari, The Independent

Exhilarating - Daisy Waugh, Herald