7 books like The Art of Racing in the Rain, from A Dog's Purpose to Merle's Door: dog-narrated novels and true stories of the human-animal bond.
Updated June 10, 2026
The Art of Racing in the Rain runs on a single audacious choice: the narrator is a dog. Enzo, an aging mutt with a philosopher's soul, watches his owner Denny Swift fight through a stalled racing career, his wife's terminal illness, and a vicious custody battle, and narrates it all through what he has learned from televised Formula One and Denny's track wisdom. The car goes where the eyes go; that which you manifest is before you. Enzo believes a dog who is ready can be reincarnated as a man, and the whole book is him preparing. It is sentimental, openly manipulative in the best and worst senses, and it works: readers who accept the premise in chapter one tend to finish in tears.
Most readers come away wanting one of two things. The bigger group wants more dogs telling stories, and the dog's-point-of-view novel is practically its own genre now: A Dog's Purpose and its sequel A Dog's Journey are the direct descendants, built explicitly around the reincarnation idea Enzo only dreams about. The other group wants the human-animal bond explored with more weight, which is where The Dogs of Babel, The Dog Who Danced, and the nonfiction standout Merle's Door come in. The Incredible Journey supplies the classic, and Fluke is the wild card for readers who liked the animal-mind conceit more than the dog itself.
A warning that applies to nearly everything here: dogs die in dog books. A Dog's Purpose in particular involves multiple dog deaths by design, since the dog reincarnates. If you want the bond without the heartbreak, Merle's Door is the gentlest on that front, though even it ends where every dog's life ends. Each pick below tells you what it shares with Enzo's story and how hard it hits.
Books to Read If You Like The Art of Racing in the Rain
A Dog's Purpose
by W. Bruce Cameron
Read this if Enzo's reincarnation dream was the part you wanted more of.
W. Bruce Cameron's 2010 bestseller takes the idea Enzo holds onto, that a dog's soul can return, and builds the entire novel from it. The same dog lives several consecutive lives, as a stray, as a boy's golden retriever named Bailey, as a police dog, and more, carrying memories forward and slowly working out what a dog is for. Like Stein, Cameron writes the dog's voice as earnest, literal, and frequently funny about human behavior, and the emotional engine is identical: a dog whose whole purpose is one person.
The difference is scope and weight. Racing in the Rain is one dog watching one man's adult crises; A Dog's Purpose is episodic, spanning decades and owners, and it is aimed at a broader, more family-friendly audience, with none of the legal drama or marital darkness of Stein's book. The trade-off is that you go through multiple dog deaths, softened by the reincarnation frame but still real. It became a hit film in 2017. This is the most natural next read on the list, full stop.
Read this if you want the dog-and-grief material taken somewhere darker and more literary.
Carolyn Parkhurst's debut shares Racing in the Rain's central image: a dog as the sole witness to a family's defining tragedy. After linguist Paul Iverson's wife Lexy falls to her death from an apple tree, the only witness is their dog Lorelei, and Paul, unraveling, sets out to teach the dog to talk so she can tell him what happened. Like Stein, Parkhurst is interested in what a dog knows and cannot say, and in a man rebuilt or broken by loss. Both books are, underneath the conceit, about a husband reconstructing his marriage after the worst has happened.
But this is not a warm book, and the dog does not narrate. It is told by Paul, it moves through real grief and some genuinely disturbing material involving people who mutilate dogs in pursuit of canine speech, and the answers it arrives at are ambiguous rather than consoling. Choose it if you found Stein's sentimentality a little easy and want the same ingredients handled as literary fiction. Skip it if you are here for comfort; this one is for readers who can take it.
Read this if the animal-consciousness conceit appealed to you more than the tearjerker.
Christopher Moore's comic novel is the lateral pick here. Marine biologist Nate Quinn has spent years studying why humpback whales sing, until the day he photographs a whale with BITE ME written across its flukes and his orderly research life capsizes into something much stranger. What it shares with The Art of Racing in the Rain is the animating question, what is going on inside an animal's mind, and a willingness to answer it with full-blown fantasy rather than realism. Enzo watching television and plotting his human rebirth is, tonally, not far from Moore's universe.
Everything else diverges. There are no dogs, nobody is reaching for your tear ducts, and Moore's register is absurdist comedy with a sci-fi turn in the back half that you should not read spoilers for. It is the right pick for the reader who liked Stein's playfulness and premise but does not want to cry again, and the wrong pick for anyone whose favorite part was the bond between a dog and his person. Funny, fast, and completely unlike the rest of this list.
Read this if you finish A Dog's Purpose and want the story completed.
This is Cameron's direct sequel to A Dog's Purpose, continuing the same soul's lives, with the dog now devoted to protecting Clarity June, the troubled granddaughter of his beloved owner Ethan, across her growing up. It keeps everything that connects the series to The Art of Racing in the Rain: the dog narrator who understands more than he can act on, the conviction that a dog's life has a purpose centered on a particular human, and the willingness to put the dog through loss to earn the ending.
Read it second, not first; it leans heavily on the emotional groundwork of A Dog's Purpose and lands much harder if you know Ethan. On its own merits it is a touch more sentimental and more plot-driven than the first book, dealing with the granddaughter's neglectful mother and her struggles into adulthood. For readers who came from Enzo wanting a long arc with a guaranteed cathartic payoff, the two books together deliver one of the most complete versions of it in the genre. It was filmed in 2019.
Read this for the classic that every animal-loyalty story descends from.
Sheila Burnford's 1961 novel is the granddaddy of the genre: two dogs, a young Labrador and an old bull terrier, and a Siamese cat cross roughly 250 miles of Canadian wilderness to get back to the family they love. The devotion that powers Enzo, the idea that a dog's loyalty to its person is absolute and active, is the entire plot here, stripped of metaphor and put on the trail. Most readers know it through the Disney adaptations (including 1993's Homeward Bound, which added the animals' voices), but the original is leaner and better.
Burnford does not let her animals talk or philosophize; the book is written from a naturalist's close third person, and the animals stay believably animal, which is its own pleasure after Enzo's monologues. It is also short, suitable for reading with kids, and far less emotionally punishing than most of this list, since it is fundamentally a survival adventure with a reunion at the end. Pick it when you want the loyalty without the grief, or to hand a younger reader their first dog book.
Read this if you want the real, nonfiction version of what Enzo and Denny had.
Ted Kerasote, an outdoor writer in Wyoming, was on a river trip when a stray dog adopted him; Merle's Door is the account of their thirteen years together. It is the closest thing on this list to Racing in the Rain's actual subject, a dog and a man building a life around each other, except every word of it happened. Kerasote's central choice was giving Merle his own dog door and the freedom to live as a thinking creature with his own social life, and the book braids their story with genuine research on canine cognition and behavior, taking seriously the question Stein answers with fancy: what is the dog actually thinking?
It is nonfiction and paced like it, with digressions into wolf studies and dog-rearing philosophy that a reader who wants pure narrative may skim. And because it is a true account of a dog's full life, you know how it has to end; the final chapters are as hard as anything in Stein, and earned more honestly. This is the pick for the reader who finished Enzo's story and looked over at their own dog. Many consider it the best dog memoir ever written.
Read this if you want another novel where a dog holds broken people together.
Susan Wilson writes in the same commercial, openly emotional register as Garth Stein, and this 2012 novel shares his core conviction that a dog can be the load-bearing structure in a damaged human life. Justine Meade, estranged from her family and down on her luck, loses her sheltie Mack on a cross-country trip; he is taken in by a couple quietly coming apart after a loss of their own. The chapters alternate between the humans and Mack's own point of view, so you get the dog's-eye narration that made Enzo work, here used to connect two stories of grief.
It is a smaller, quieter book than Racing in the Rain, without the racing metaphors, the courtroom stakes, or the reincarnation mythology; the drama is domestic and the resolution gentler. Some readers find Wilson's human characters thinner than her dogs, which is arguably true of Stein as well. Pick this when you want a comfortable, tear-streaked weekend read in exactly the same emotional key, and consider Wilson's One Good Dog afterward if it lands.
What book is most similar to The Art of Racing in the Rain?
A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron is the standard answer, and it is the right one. Both are narrated by a devoted dog, both center on the dog's belief that his life has a purpose tied to one person, and Cameron builds his whole novel around the reincarnation idea that Enzo only hopes for. Readers who want a true story instead should go to Merle's Door by Ted Kerasote.
Do the dogs die in these books?
Mostly yes, so plan accordingly. A Dog's Purpose involves several dog deaths by design, since the same soul reincarnates, and A Dog's Journey continues that pattern. Merle's Door covers a real dog's whole life through to its end. The gentlest picks are The Incredible Journey, which is a survival adventure with a happy reunion, and Fluke, which has no dogs at all.
Is The Art of Racing in the Rain based on a true story?
No, it is fiction, but Garth Stein drew on real life. He raced cars in Seattle, where the novel is set, and has said the reincarnation idea came from a Mongolian belief, encountered through a documentary, that a dog who is ready can be reborn as a human. The 2019 film adaptation stars Milo Ventimiglia as Denny with Kevin Costner voicing Enzo.
What should I read if I liked the racing parts?
None of the dog books on this list carry the motorsport thread forward, since the overlap genre is basically just Enzo. For racing itself, readers usually move to nonfiction like Garth Stein's acknowledged influences or motorsport memoirs. If what you actually liked was the racing-as-philosophy angle, the car goes where the eyes go, Stein's other novels keep the reflective voice, though without the track.
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