Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time pulled from children's reading list

Mark Haddon ‘puzzled’ as Lincoln High School in Tallahassee, Florida, withdraws bestseller from school’s reading programme amid concerns over swearing

Author Mark Haddon has said that he is “puzzled and fascinated by the way in which some readers remain untroubled by the content of a novel but deeply offended by the language in which it is described”, after his award-winning book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was pulled from a summer reading list at a Florida school over parental concerns about swearing.

Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year which is now also a prize-winning play, The Curious Incident is narrated by a 15-year-old with Asperger’s Syndrome, as he embarks on an investigation into the death of his neighbour’s dog. It had been given as a summer reading assignment to students at Lincoln High School in Tallahassee, Florida. But according to local paper the Tallahassee Democrat, after the school’s head received “concerns over the delivery of the text” in emails and telephone calls from parents, the assignment was cancelled in order to, in the head’s words, “give the opportunity for the parents to parent”.

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