I picked this up at the “donate one, take one” book stall in Totteridge & Whetstone tube station.
Dion is an ultramarathon runner. While racing in an event in the Gobi Desert, he is “adopted” by a small dog who runs nearly 80 miles of the way with him. Before leaving China to return home to Edinburgh, the smitten Dion decides that he will bring Gobi back to live with him. A crowdfunding page is set up to pay for this (importing a pet is a complex process), but Gobi goes missing in the streets and Dion returns to China to help look for her.
He is eventually reunited with the dog, of course, but there are many struggles before they can come home and live happily ever after. He is followed by sinister men in suits, for example, and has to live in a state of paranoid seclusion.
Inevitably, this becomes a heartwarming tale about man’s best friend and how rescuing a dog “healed wounds I didn’t know were within me”. The book is slightly diminished by occasionally drifting into self-help territory, making some fairly obvious statements about personal belief and overcoming failure. Perhaps there wasn’t enough to say about the dog to fill 254 pages. And although it’s a device to set the scene and provide an emotional/psychological context (father died young, turned out not to be real father), I could have done without the childhood recollections – how much did we really need to know of Dion’s youth? – which risk turning this into a “misery memoir”.
On the plus side, Finding Gobi benefits from details of running a 155-mile ultramarathon. His accounts of the extremes of the race and the performance of the runners in dangerously scorching desert conditions are probably the best part of the book.
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