A mute boy and his dogs take to the woods in the captivating story

Sit. Stay. Read. The dog days of summer are nigh, and here is a big-hearted novel you can fall into, get lost in and finally emerge from reluctantly, a little surprised that the real world went on spinning while you were absorbed.

You haven't heard of the author. David Wroblewski is a 48-year-old software developer in Colorado, and this is his first novel. It's being released with the kind of hoopla once reserved for the publishing world's most established authors. No wonder: "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle" is an enormous but effortless read, trimmed down to the elements of a captivating story about a mute boy and his dogs. That sets off alarm bells, I know: Handicapped kids and pets can make a toxic mix of sentimentality. But Wroblewski writes with such grace and energy that Edgar Sawtelle never succumbs to that danger. Inspired by Shakespeare's "Hamlet," this Midwestern tale manages to be both tender and suspenseful.

The story takes place in a small Wisconsin town where Gar and Trudy Sawtelle raise and train their own unusual breed of dogs. The time is the early 1970s, but Wroblewski casts the setting in the sepia tones of an earlier period, as though cut off from the modern age. Their only child is an endearing boy named Edgar, who arrived 14 years ago after a string of miscarriages that almost crushed his mother's spirit. Edgar cannot speak or make any sounds, but he's otherwise healthy. To his grateful parents, "it didn't matter what in him was special and what ordinary. He was alive. ... Compared to that, silence was nothing."

He quickly develops a rich facility with words and communicates in a mixture of standard American Sign Language and his family's own private gestures, "a language in which everything important could be said." And, to a remarkable extent, that discourse includes their animals.

Into this idyllic setting slithers Edgar's smooth-talking uncle, Claude. You don't need to catch the "Hamlet" references, and if you do, that won't sap the novel's suspense. Wroblewski plays with Shakespeare's troubled prince the same way Jane Smiley used "King Lear" for "A Thousand Acres," borrowing the frame but not the details. Claude has been in the Navy, in Korea, and though he can be charming, he's "ferociously solitary." Edgar's father gives Claude a job and a place to stay while he gets back on his feet, but the situation becomes uncomfortable almost immediately: "Arguments arose, puzzling and disconcerting," Wroblewski writes. "Though the details differed each time, Edgar got the idea that Claude and his father had slipped without their knowing it into some irresistible rhythm of taunt and reply whose references were too subtle or too private to decipher."

Eventually, those disagreements spark a murder that shatters everyone's life on the farm. Edgar is forced to flee into the forests of Wisconsin with three young dogs no more ready to live on their own than he is. It's a long, dark journey for this little gang, a constant struggle against starvation and discovery. But the real triumph is Edgar, this boy of rare sensitivity, virtue and resilience.

The final section gathers like a furious storm of hope and retribution that brings young Edgar to a destiny he doesn't deserve but never resists. It's a devastating finale, shocking though foretold, that transforms the story into something grand and unforgettable.