![History of Wolves](/sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_tiny/public/images/history_of_wolves.jpg?itok=82vfSu_g 92w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_small/public/images/history_of_wolves.jpg?itok=FWXjTqW2 114w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_medium/public/images/history_of_wolves.jpg?itok=StbGzZr7 148w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_large/public/images/history_of_wolves.jpg?itok=p3xhh-o7 161w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_x_large/public/images/history_of_wolves.jpg?itok=ucnD5tFy 203w, /sites/default/files/styles/2_3_media_huge/public/images/history_of_wolves.jpg?itok=l0iIMaG3 266w)
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.
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.