Over a few days, a teenage girl makes a set of choices that will reverberate throughout her life in Emily Fridlund’s powerful and intense debut
Emily Fridlund
The American novelist and academic was shortlisted for her first – and so far only – novel, which was first written as a short story.
Fridlund was inspired in part to write her story after reading Disgrace, the former Booker Prize winner JM Coetzee’s account of the ramifications of an impulsive affair between a professor and a student. Her own tale is set in bleak north Minnesota and centres on a socially maladroit teenage girl called Linda, her history teacher Mr Grierson and a doomed four-year-old boy, Paul. The wolves of the title refer to a presentation made by Linda discussing the changing power relationships within a wolf pack, a theme that becomes increasingly applicable as the themes of the novel develop and darken inexorably.