"This novel brims with vibrant, everyday charm—comforting like stretching lazily under the afternoon sun."
——Tan Zhuo, Actress

"I see myself in Kang Nan. Even every side character feels like someone we’d meet in life. In this story, there are no outright villains. Everyone’s flaws and virtues have roots. I love this approach. In this lighthearted urban vignette, the line between reality and fiction blurs. They say every dog has its habitual walking route. Maybe we’re the same—each playing our roles, walking our one-way streets. Sometimes we stray, but it’s okay. The leash in our hands will pull us back."
——Feng Xuan, Lead Singer of More Feel

★A heartwarming work by Qi Lang, a writer of the new generation — a tender gift for all pet lovers, beautifully portraying the mutual redemption between humans and animals!

★"My name is Lucky. I was a stray. Thank you for pausing gently in my world and letting me stay with you."
The canine protagonist of this book isn’t just any pampered pet but an abandoned stray. Through this story, the author advocates for kindness toward animals and reverence for life. This book will bring warmth and emotion to every reader, reminding us to cherish the important beings around us.

★It’s also a book of courage for every girl.
"Even if I die ten thousand times, as long as dawn comes, I’ll live again."
Kang Nan is the epitome of an urban working woman — her career setbacks, romantic disappointments, and life’s struggles mirror what countless girls face in reality. She is authentic, ordinary, and through her, you’ll see the defiance, resilience, and bravery of working women.

★Featuring the original promotional single "Another Planet" by renowned band More Feel, with its heartwarming lyrics included in the book.

"I want to stay by your side. I want to be your treasure."

With tender words, Qi Lang tells the story of Kang Nan — a girl disillusioned with life and love and her heartwarming bond with Lucky, a stray dog.

In this story, there is mutual redemption between a human and a stray dog, as well as hilarious tales of a single dog owner's trials and tribulations. It also includes a record of failures in both career and love, and an inspiring "rock-bottom" style comeback in life.
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After suffering dual defeats in love and work, urban office worker Kang Nan drunkenly stumbles upon a stray dog on the street. On a whim, she takes him home and names him Lucky — and thus begins her chaotic new life.

Unexpectedly, Lucky changes everything. No longer a work-obsessed shut-in, Kang Nan befriends a quirky pack of "dog people" and meets the enigmatic Uncle Wang.

Their relationship starts with misunderstandings and dog-induced comedy but gradually deepens. Like Lucky, the gentle and attentive Wang becomes indispensable to Kang Nan’s world.

Just as romance blooms, however, Wang’s ex-wife storms back into the picture, leaving Kang Nan vulnerable once more. To make matters worse, her career hits rock bottom. Fortunately, the sunshine-like and puppy-like colleague Xu Zhou becomes her ray of hope, accompanying her back to her hometown to rediscover the courage to start anew...

Qi Lang

Real name Du Xiangyu, author, film and television producer and planner. Published the novel "Little Years" in 2019, and has served as the producer for several online series such as "The Hidden Corner" and "The Silence Truth". With a fresh creative perspective and viewpoints on fictional stories, the overall writing style is elegant and gentle, excelling at depicting urban life and the subtle entanglements of people or the soft emotions in youth literature, adorned with sharp and humorous insights into life's trivialities, telling true and warm stories of ordinary people's lives and their extraordinary emotional worlds with a language immersed in simple values.

Chapter 1 30-Year-Olds, Owning Nothing but a Dog
Chapter 2 It's Not Dreams That Wake You Up, It's the Dog
Chapter 3 On the Date Path, Losing Face and Losing the Dog
Chapter 4 A Happy Dog Life, An Awkward Human Life
Chapter 5 Life Is Already So Difficult, One Must Strive for the Life They Want
Chapter 6 Getting Drunk at 20 Makes You Cute; at 30, It Makes You Crazy
Chapter 7 No One Can Always Be a Young Girl, But One Can Be a 'Senior Girl'
Chapter 8 Even the Dog Is Pregnant, Yet You're Still Single
Chapter 9 At This Age, Everyone Who Comes Is a Guest
Chapter 10 The Person You Want to See When Drunk Is the One You Like
Chapter 11 To Break Up, First Divide the Dog
Chapter 12 Completely Forgetting First Love Is a Basic Quality of a Mature 30-Year-Old Woman
Chapter 13 When Love Vow Becomes a Battle Vow, The love game is over
Chapter 14 The Leap at 20, The Strain at 30
Chapter 15 Don't Be Like a Stray Dog, Taking Charity as Home
Chapter 16 100 Reasons to Love at 30, 10,000 to Stay Single
Chapter 17 If You Can't Find the Antidote to Life, Just Fight Fire with Fire
Chapter 18 Without Freedom of Heart, You'll Never See the Stars and the Sea
Chapter 19 At My Age, Go Clubbing Like Battling the Spring Festival Crowd (9 billion people)
Chapter 20 Everyone Who Fails in Love Becomes a Philosopher After Drinking
Chapter 21 There Isn't That Much Happiness in Life; Peace Is Already Not Easy


Extra Chapter: The Dog's Monologue
Big Bear
Lucky
Caesar
Black Bean
Ge Ge
Bella
Another Planet

Preface By Xin Shuang


I once had a miniature dachshund.
At the beginning of the millennium, we met by chance on a lawn beside a music festival stage. It had extremely short legs, with half its tongue hanging out of its mouth, resembling a bench with ears holding a short cigar, looking peculiar and unruly. As the crowd began to get excited with the band on stage, it came and sat beside me.
I looked at it, and it looked at the half-eaten sausage in my hand. We stared at each other for a long time. Out of politeness, after taking a bite, I gave the rest to it. After the show, it followed me to the bus stop, and I walked back to the lawn with it several times. Having determined that it was indeed a stray without an owner, I gritted my teeth and took a red Xiali taxi that cost one point two per kilometer to bring it home.
A stray dog met a rootless band guitarist; I don't know if that was its luck or misfortune. Because of that half-tongue that always hung out of its mouth, I named it “Waggle”. Whether this defective tongue was due to a congenital deformity or an acquired injury, I didn't know. In any case, it barely affected Waggle's eating, and even for its size, it should be considered a huge appetite. Sometimes it can eat all its own dog food and then still manage to eat half of my fried pancake.
Waggle and I were together for two years. During those two years, I was generally very unlucky, with no achievements in any aspect, living in a muddle, and playing music in a mess. Perhaps to others, I looked more like a stray than Waggle. If Waggle could speak, it might have shaken my shoulder and encouraged me, "Cheer up, friend!" But it was just a dog, unaware and powerless regarding the fate of both of us, content only with eating a full meal of fried pancakes and riding on my dirty Converse shoes for ten minutes.
Twenty years later, Qi Lang invited me to write the preface for his new book, and I readily agreed, but I was also anxious about what exactly to write. After much thought, I decided to write a few sentences about Waggle, whom I haven't mentioned to anyone for many years.
Waggle and I moved about three to four times in those two years. Later, I moved to Qinghe outside the North Fifth Ring Road in Beijing. I often visited a small restaurant downstairs from my community that was both good and cheap. The fried pancakes were cheap, five yuan for a vegetarian one and eight yuan for a meat one; second, this shop often had people order lamb spine, and the boss liked Waggle and often threw a few bones that weren't too clean to it when clearing the table. The more I came, the more familiar I became with the boss. The band began to improve, occasionally receiving some out-of-town performance invitations. When I was not in Beijing, I would leave Waggle to the restaurant owner for a few days.Under the nourishment of mutton scorpion (a type of mutton dish), Waggle's weight has been steadily increasing.


Just when I thought those unlucky lives were gradually moving away from us, it reached its peak without warning — Waggle died from eating rat poison from the restaurant kitchen. I ended the tour, returned home alone, threw away the canvas shoes that Waggle loved to ride, thoroughly cleaned the room, and because I was tired of the turmoil and fried pancakes, at the end of that year, I found a nine-to-five job and started working.
I tried hard to recall while writing this passage, but I found that there was really little left to remember about that depressed and decadent time. At that time, the word "healing" was not yet popular, and I couldn't judge whether Waggle had healed me at some point. I just felt that those moments in memory that were fading away had to be connected and clarified through it.
I now live in a relatively elegant community, with a European-style pavilion surrounded by green plants in the center of the community. Every evening, groups of dog friends gather to chat, and the dogs run and play on the lawn next to the pavilion. These puppies are well-groomed and diverse in breeds, but I have never seen a dachshund among them, nor a tongue as strange as Waggle's. This lawn is not like the one where I met Waggle; it is neat, decent, and vibrant. I can't help but think, if we met later, would I also blend into the chatting crowd, treat those bleak lives as jokes, and watch it become one of those happy little animals? Of course, this won't happen. I have no chance to have another dog named Waggle. Perhaps it remains on that lawn at the beginning of the millennium, coolly swinging its tongue, waiting to meet some vague guitarist.
The story of Waggle and me was evoked by Qi Lang's words, and maybe those words will also evoke someone else's moment, whether it's about a dog or a period of life. They have all happened and are so precious.