For read­ers of From Scratch and Mar­ley & Me: After los­ing his beloved dog and near­ly every­thing else, one man’s acci­den­tal arrival in a remote Ital­ian vil­lage leads to unex­pect­ed friend­ship, heal­ing, and a new def­i­n­i­tion of home. When Matthew Sigman’s dog Augie died after eigh­teen years togeth­er, the loss unrav­eled every­thing. Jew­ish tra­di­tion offers an archi­tec­ture for grief: shi­va, Kad­dish, the com­mu­nal rit­u­als that hold mourn­ers through the unsur­viv­able. But those rites are for peo­ple. There is no pre­scribed mourn­ing peri­od for a dog, no prayer that cov­ers the par­tic­u­lar ache of that absence, leav­ing Sig­man in a kind of grief with­out a map. His part­ner left. Work dis­ap­peared. The ceil­ing of his West Vil­lage apart­ment lit­er­al­ly col­lapsed. With reminders of Augie around every cor­ner, he fled to Europe, where a glitch in the Airbnb algo­rithm deposit­ed him in Quar­na, a remote Ital­ian moun­tain vil­lage. What he found there offered the space for heal­ing and redis­cov­ery. In Because of a Dog, mourn­ing becomes its own unex­pect­ed path home.