History of Wolves

Preview

Failed to add items

Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.

Add to basket failed.

Please try again later

Add to wishlist failed.

Please try again later

Remove from wishlist failed.

Please try again later

Adding to library failed

Please try again

Follow podcast failed

Unfollow podcast failed

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.

Try for £0.00

More purchase options

History of Wolves

By: Emily Fridlund

Narrated by: Caitlin Thorburn

Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £14.35

Summary

Even a lone wolf wants to belong....

Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in an ex-commune beside a lake in the beautiful, austere backwoods of Northern Minnesota. The other girls at school call Linda 'Freak' or 'Commie'. Her parents mostly leave her to her own devices whilst the other inhabitants have grown up and moved on.

So when the perfect family - mother, father and their little boy, Paul - move into the cabin across the lake, Linda insinuates her way into the family's orbit. She begins to babysit Paul and feels that she finally has a place to belong. But something isn't right. Drawn into secrets she doesn't understand, Linda must make a choice. But how can a girl with no real knowledge of the world understand what the consequences will be?

2018, Man Booker Prize, Short-listed

Emily FridlundCaitlin ThorburnOrion

Family Life

Fiction

Genre Fiction

Literary Fiction

Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic reviews

Reminds me of Curtis Sittenfeld...so original, a beautiful literary work" (Viv Groskop)

"A writer with a great future ahead of her...her prose is exquisite" (Louise Doughty)

So delicately calibrated and precisely beautiful that one might not immediately sense the sledgehammer of pain building inside this book. And I mean that in the best way. What powerful tension and depth (Aimee Bender, author of The Color Master and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake)

As exquisite a first novel as I've ever encountered. Poetic, complex and utterly, heartbreakingly beautiful (T. C. Boyle, author of The Harder They Come)

First thing you see is the bracing intelligence of the book's young narrator - no big-eyed sentiments for Linda, raised amid blighted ideals in the ceaseless winters and vast swamps of northern Minnesota. So observant is Linda that you trust her instantly, but it's her own search for trust, for connection even at enormous cost, that will hold you to the final hour. Emily Fridlund's language is generous and precise, her story grief-tempered and forcefully moving. History of Wolves is the loneliest thing I've read in years, and it's gorgeous. These are haunted pages (Leif Enger)

Most relevant

At a very basic level this novel seems very simple, a tale of a young girl growing up in an unusual environment ( an ex-commune) who becomes attracted to the life of a seemingly ordinary family who live nearby. She becomes drawn in by that family and becomes implicated in the secrets that bind them. It all ends in tragedy and the girl has to examine her part in it.

But this novel is so much more than that straightforward narrative. It examines bullying in all its forms, by adults and children; secrets and lies; the nature of truth; coercion within relationships; religion and the choices that it forces upon vulnerable people; the rights of children; alleged paedophiles and their 'victims'.

It is very atmospheric and the descriptions of the remote area in which the story is set are very vivid. The only thing that bothered me was the voice of the narrator. Someone with a little more gravitas would have been more suitable, I felt. but overall, it didn't spoil the story.