Fiction

Ordinary Wolves

A Novel

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

“I’ve not read anything that so captures the contrast between the wild world and our ravaging consumer culture. Ordinary Wolves is painful and beautiful.”—LOUISE ERDRICH

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Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award

“An astonishing book: exotic as a dream, acrid and beautiful and honest as life.”—Barbara Kingsolver

After his mother flees back to the Lower 48, never to return, Cutuk Hawcly is raised along with his older sister and brother by his father, Abe, in an igloo on Alaska’s tundra. Cutuk learns from the local indigenous community how to survive and provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading, yet he’s still deemed an outsider by the Iñupiaq residents in the nearby village of Takunak because he’s white. Despite his love for Alaska’s wilderness and Dawna, a young woman in the village, he leaves for the city and its modern-world trappings. But when incompatible realities collide, Cutuk is forced to choose between two worlds, both seemingly bent on rejecting him.

A stunning, powerfully told, and authentically rendered coming-of-age novel, Ordinary Wolves brilliantly captures a young man finding his place in the world that’s shifting in ways he never imagined.

ISBN

9781571311214

Publish Date

11/03/2015

Pages

354

Dimensions

5.5 × 8.5 × 0.75 in

Weight

5.9 oz

Cover Art

Reader's Guide

Author

Seth Kantner

Seth Kantner is a commercial fisherman, writer, and wildlife photographer, born and raised in northern Alaska. In addition to his novel, Ordinary Wolves, and his essay collection, Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska, his writings and photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Orion, Smithsonian, Adventure Journal, Alaska, and other literary journals and anthologies.

Praise and Prizes

“Once in a great while a novel comes along that can shiver right down your bones and show you the world was always larger than you knew. This is just such an astonishing book: exotic as a dream, acrid and beautiful and honest as life.”

Barbara Kingsolver
“A magnificently realized story … Smart and authentic … Ordinary Wolves has scope and a style to match its subjects, the wide-open spaces of Alaska and youth… . It’s hard to imagine a better start.”

New York Times
“I’ve not read anything that so captures the contrast between the wild world and our ravaging consumer culture. Ordinary Wolves is painful and beautiful.”

Louise Erdrich
“Seth Kantner writes beautifully, but what’s special about Ordinary Wolves is the author’s unflinching portrayal of Alaska’s social dynamic—the racial tensions, the contempt for big-game-hunting dentists, the use of cleaning solvents as booze. This commanding debut is messy, funny, and anything but noble, it’s stridently human, and Kantner gets all the blood, guts, pride, and spite down on the page.”

Outside
“A rare thing of beauty, a novel alive with detail about a life most of us would never experience.”

Los Angeles Times
“Seth Kantner’s language flashes across the page like the northern lights themselves. A mesmerizing debut novel.”

Denver Post
“If the emotional terrain is universal, the physical one is uncharted: farther North than Jack
London, deeper into hunting than Ernest Hemmingway.”

The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Ordinary Wolves is to the mind what a chunk of pemmican made from dried caribou, cranberries, currants and rendered fat is to the body: It’s going to stick to your ribs for a long time.”

Minneapolis Star Tribune
“This riveting first novel sets a new standard, offering a profound and beautiful account of a boy’s attempt to reconcile his Alaskan wilderness experience with modern society. As a revelation of the devastation modern America brings to a natural lifestyle, it’s a tour de force, and may be the best treatment of the Northwest and its people since Jack London’s works.”

Publishers Weekly

(starred review)

Ordinary Wolves

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