Debut novelist Love, Thompson did not arrive at fiction through the conventional door. There was no MFA, no literary fellowship, no carefully cultivated agent relationship. There was a country pub in regional Australia, an old toothless dog named Audrey, and a barking neighbour’s dog that refused to quiet down. From those ingredients, Dead Dog Barking was written — a book that critics and early readers are already comparing to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag for its blend of biting humour and emotional honesty.
An unlikely literary debut
Thompson splits her time between writing and running her family’s country pub, a setting that informs every page of her debut. The novel’s fictional town of Sope, with its insufferable neighbours, country-pub rituals, and unspoken loneliness, is drawn from a decade of close observation from behind the bar.
“I never sat down to write a novel,” Thompson has said in early interviews. “I sat down to make a sad teenage girl laugh, and I kept going because the characters got loud.”
A distinctly Australian voice
What sets Thompson apart is the comic register: a dry, irreverent, deeply Australian voice that resists both sentimentality and cynicism. Her protagonist, Charlie Black, returns home from years of spiritual searching in India to find that the chaos she fled has only multiplied. The novel’s humour lives in the gap between Charlie’s self-improvement vocabulary and the small-town reality she’s walked back into.
Early readers have noted that Dead Dog Barking is “wickedly funny” and “warm-hearted” in equal measure, with reviewer Aya Nakamura calling it a book that “made me laugh so hard I scared my actual dog, then blindsided me with a gut-punch of tenderness I’m still unpacking.”
What’s next
Thompson is already at work on a sequel, which is expected to revisit Sope and its residents with the same comic precision. In the meantime, the hard cover edition of Dead Dog Barking launches mid 2026 and is available for pre-order now through MMH Press.
Readers, booksellers and event organisers can reach Thompson via the Love, Thompson website.