Ordinary Wolves
“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
Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award
“An astonishing book: exotic as a dream, acrid and beautiful and honest as life.”—Barbara Kingsolver
Born and raised in the Arctic, Cutuk Hawcley has learned to provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading. And yet in spite of his respect for the indigenous hunters who have taught him how to survive, he is jeered and pummeled by Inupiaq children. When he leaves for the city as a young man, two incompatible realities collide, forcing Cutuk to choose between worlds, both seemingly bent on rejecting him.
Acclaimed as “the first contemporary Alaska novel that seems true, the first one that matters” (Nick Jans), Ordinary Wolves depicts a life different from what most of us have known: inhuman cold, the taste of rancid salmon shared with shivering sled dogs, hunkering in a sod igloo while blizzards moan overhead. A singular achievement.
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Seth Kantner
Praise and Prizes
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