Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

THE NO. 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER THAT MOVED DOG LOVERS ALL OVER THE WORLD

**NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING OWEN WILSON AND JENNIFER ANISTON**

'A book with intense appeal . . . tenderly follows its subject from sunrise to sunset'
New York Times

'Not just a funny dog story . . . It's a universal story of family life and a publishing sensation' The Times

'Made me laugh so much I pulled a muscle in my solar plexus' Daily Mail

'A wonderful, moving book that even non-dog-lovers cannot fail to enjoy' Mail on Sunday

* * * * * *

The original book that moved millions of readers around the world and that inspired the major motion picture of the same name starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston.

This No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller tells the heart-warming tale of how a wiggly yellow fur ball of a puppy could grow into a barrelling, ninety-seven pound stramroller of a Labrador retriever who would prove that unconditional love comes in many forms.

John and Jenny were just beginning their life together. They were young and in love, with a perfect little house and not a care in the world. Along comes Marley, mischievous, hyperactive and so unruly he is expelled from obedience school. How could they possibly know that this incorrigible dog could teach them more about love for life than they could hope to teach him?

Since becoming a major motion picture, starring Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson, this heart-warming and unforgettable story of a family and their haphazard dog has become a timeless family favourite.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Marley & Me LP Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog Chapter One And Puppy Makes Three We were young. We were in love. We were rollicking in those sublime early days of marriage when life seems about as good as life can get. We could not leave well enough alone. And so on a January evening in 1991, my wife of fifteen months and I ate a quick dinner together and headed off to answer a classified ad in the Palm Beach Post . Why we were doing this, I wasn't quite sure. A few weeks earlier I had awoken just after dawn to find the bed beside me empty. I got up and found Jenny sitting in her bathrobe at the glass table on the screened porch of our little bungalow, bent over the newspaper with a pen in her hand. There was nothing unusual about the scene. Not only was the Palm Beach Post our local paper, it was also the source of half of our household income. We were a two-newspaper-career couple. Jenny worked as a feature writer in the Post 's "Accent" section; I was a news reporter at the competing paper in the area, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel , based an hour south in Fort Lauderdale. We began every morning poring over the newspapers, seeing how our stories were played and how they stacked up to the competition. We circled, underlined, and clipped with abandon. But on this morning, Jenny's nose was not in the news pages but in the classified section. When I stepped closer, I saw she was feverishly circling beneath the heading "Pets -- Dogs." "Uh," I said in that new-husband, still-treading-gently voice. "Is there something I should know?" She did not answer. "Jen-Jen?" "It's the plant," she finally said, her voice carrying a slight edge of desperation. "The plant?" I asked. "That dumb plant," she said. "The one we killed." The one we killed? I wasn't about to press the point, but for the record it was the plant that I bought and she killed. I had surprised her with it one night, a lovely large dieffenbachia with emerald-and-cream variegated leaves. "What's the occasion?" she'd asked. But there was none. I'd given it to her for no reason other than to say, "Damn, isn't married life great?" She had adored both the gesture and the plant and thanked me by throwing her arms around my neck and kissing me on the lips. Then she promptly went on to kill my gift to her with an assassin's coldhearted efficiency. Not that she was trying to; if anything, she nurtured the poor thing to death. Jenny didn't exactly have a green thumb. Working on the assumption that all living things require water, but apparently forgetting that they also need air, she began flooding the dieffenbachia on a daily basis. "Be careful not to overwater it," I had warned. "Okay," she had replied, and then dumped on another gallon. The sicker the plant got, the more she doused it, until finally it just kind of melted into an oozing heap. I looked at its limp skeleton in the pot by the window and thought, Man, someone who believes in omens could have a field day with this one . Now here she was, somehow making the cosmic leap of logic from dead flora in a pot to living fauna in the pet classifieds. Kill a plant , buy a puppy . Well, of course it made perfect sense. I looked more closely at the newspaper in front of her and saw that one ad in particular seemed to have caught her fancy. She had drawn three fat red stars beside it. It read: "Lab puppies, yellow. AKC purebred. All shots. Parents on premises." "So," I said, "can you run this plant-pet thing by me one more time?" "You know," she said, looking up. "I tried so hard and look what happened. I can't even keep a stupid houseplant alive. I mean, how hard is that ? All you need to do is water the damn thing." Then she got to the real issue: "If I can't even keep a plantalive, how am I ever going to keep a baby alive?" She looked like she might start crying. The Baby Thing, as I called it, had become a constant in Jenny's life and was getting bigger by the day. When we had first met, at a small newspaper in western Michigan, she was just a few months out of college, and serious adulthood still seemed a far distant concept. For both of us, it was our first professional job out of school. We ate a lot of pizza, drank a lot of beer, and gave exactly zero thought to the possibility of someday being anything other than young, single, unfettered consumers of pizza and beer. But years passed. We had barely begun dating when various job opportunities -- and a one-year postgraduate program for me -- pulled us in different directions across the eastern United States. At first we were one hour's drive apart. Then we were three hours apart. Then eight, then twenty-four. By the time we both landed together in South Florida and tied the knot, she was nearly thirty. Her friends were having babies. Her body was sending her strange messages. That once seemingly eternal window of procreative opportunity was slowly lowering. I leaned over her from behind, wrapped my arms around her shoulders, and kissed the top of her head. "It's okay," I said. But I had to admit, she raised a good question. Neither of us had ever really nurtured a thing in our lives. Sure, we'd had pets growing up, but they didn't really count. We always knew our parents would keep them alive and well. We both knew we wanted to one day have children, but was either of us really up for the job? Children were so . . . so . . . scary. They were helpless and fragile and looked like they would break easily if dropped. Marley & Me LP Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog . Copyright © by John Grogan. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog by John Grogan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Okay, maybe he chewed things and ran into screen doors, but Marley also taught Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Grogan the meaning of love. Morrow's big hit at BEA. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Labrador retrievers are generally considered even-tempered, calm and reliable-and then there's Marley, the subject of this delightful tribute to one Lab who doesn't fit the mold. Grogan, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and his wife, Jenny, were newly married and living in West Palm Beach when they decided that owning a dog would give them a foretaste of the parenthood they anticipated. Marley was a sweet, affectionate puppy who grew into a lovably naughty, hyperactive dog. With a light touch, the author details how Marley was kicked out of obedience school after humiliating his instructor (whom Grogan calls Miss Dominatrix) and swallowed an 18-karat solid gold necklace (Grogan describes his gross but hilarious "recovery operation"). With the arrival of children in the family, Marley became so incorrigible that Jenny, stressed out by a new baby, ordered her husband to get rid of him; she eventually recovered her equilibrium and relented. Grogan's chronicle of the adventures parents and children (eventually three) enjoyed with the overly energetic but endearing dog is delivered with great humor. Dog lovers will love this account of Grogan's much loved canine. Agent, Laurie Abkemeier. (On sale Oct. 25) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Oh my. I don't think I've ever seen anything so cute in my life. Thus author Grogan's wife sealed their fate when they just went to look at a litter of Labrador retriever puppies and ended up picking out Marley. Maybe their first clue should have been that the breeder had discounted the price on their puppy, or when they saw his father charging out of the woods covered in mud with a crazed but joyous look in his eye. Despite these portents, Marley entered their lives, and nothing was ever the same again. Between careening through screen doors and swallowing everything that would fit in his mouth, Marley also managed to comfort these two when they miscarried their first child. Although Marley got kicked out of obedience training after he dragged the instructor across the parking lot and terrorized his pet sitter, he also landed a minor role in a straight-to-video movie. Marley, incorrigible though he was, had inserted himself into the author's life in a way no normal dog could. A warm, friendly -memoir-with-dog. --Nancy Bent Copyright 2005 Booklist

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Bestselling author, John Grogan, was born on March 20, 1957 in Detroit, Michigan. He majored in journalism and English at Central Michigan University. In 1985, Grogan won a fellowship into the Kiplinger Mid-Career Program in Public Affairs Reporting at Ohio State University, where he obtained his Masters degree. Grogan earned a second fellowship at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida. Grogan's first full-time writing job was as a police reporter for the Herald-Palladium in Michigan. Grogan has also written for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and was also editor of Rodale's Organic Gardening magazine.

Grogan's book, Marley and Me, spent over seventy-six weeks on the bestseller list and was made into a movie in 2008. Grogan and his wife, Jenny, live in rural Pennsylvania.