"A brilliant and breathtaking debut that captivated readers and
garnered critical acclaim in the United Kingdom, " The Tenderness
of Wolves "was long-listed for the Orange Prize in fiction and won
the Costa Award (formerly the Whitbread) Book of the Year."
The year is 1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove
River, a tiny isolated settlement in the Northern Territory, when a
man is brutally murdered. Laurent Jammett had been a voyageur for
the Hudson Bay Company before an accident lamed him four years
earlier. The same accident afforded him the little parcel of land
in Dove River, land that the locals called unlucky due to the
untimely death of the previous owner.
A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime scene and sees
the tracks leading from the dead man's cabin north toward the
forest and the tundra beyond. It is Mrs. Ross's knock on the door
of the largest house in Caulfield that launches the investigation.
Within hours she will regret that knock with a mother's love -- for
soon she makes another discovery: her seventeen-year-old son
Francis has disappeared and is now considered a prime suspect.
In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the crime and to
the township -- Andrew Knox, Dove River's elder statesman; Thomas
Sturrock, a wily American itinerant trader; Donald Moody, the
clumsy young Company representative; William Parker, a half-breed
Native American and trapper who was briefly detained for Jammett's
murder before becoming Mrs. Ross's guide. But the question remains:
do these men want to solve the crime or exploit it?
One by one, the searchers set out from Dove River following the
tracks across a desolate landscape -- home to only wild animals,
madmen, and fugitives -- variously seeking a murderer, a son, two
sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native
American culture before the snows settle and cover the tracks of
the past for good.
In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves
adventure, suspense, revelation, and humor into an exhilarating
thriller; a panoramic historical romance; a gripping murder
mystery; and, ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her
storytelling, an epic for the ages.
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