Alone in a room overlooking a harbor on the coast of Ireland, a man—introspective, almost anonymous, keenly observant—recounts his life.

Blurring memory and dream, the imagined and real, the stories in On Board the Dog Star follow this man as he wanders the streets of his youth, encounters characters from the books scattered across his floor, returns again and again to an apartment in Spain, a pensione in Rome, a train station in Marseille, and the mirage of the novel he's never written. On Board the Dog Star introduces the singular work of Edward McWhinney, a talent decades in arriving.