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The Hunger of the Wolf: A Novel
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this ebook
A “spellbinding” (Publishers Weekly) literary novel with fangs: a sweeping, genre-busting tale of money, morality, and the American Dream—and the men and monsters who profit in its pursuit—set in New York, London, and the Canadian wilderness.
Hunters found his body naked in the snow. The body is that of Ben Wylie, the second-richest man in America, and it is found in a remote patch of northern Canada. Far away, in New York, the son of the Wylie family’s housekeepers tries to figure out how and why Ben died. The answer lies in the tortured history of the Wylie family, who built up their massive fortune over three generations. All of the Wylie men struggle with a secret: they are werewolves. The threads of their destinies, both financial and supernatural, lead twistingly but inevitably to the naked body in the snow and a final, terrible revelation.
The Hunger of the Wolf is a novel about what it means to be a man in a world of money. It’s about the pursuit of wealth through the rising tide of America in the twentieth century, seen through the sober lens of more recent economic times. It’s a novel about the innate nature of violence: The Wylie men struggle to control their inner rage, through physical restraint, psychotherapy, drugs, hedonistic abandon, and good old-fashioned denial. It’s a story of fathers and sons, about secrets that are kept in families, and about the cost of the tension between the public face and the private soul—the cruelty and loneliness and occasional joy of being a magical being in a quotidian world.
A brilliant mystery from page one, “The Hunger of the Wolf is simply one of the most observant and entertaining examinations of modern will-to-wealth that fiction has produced in recent years” (Miami Herald).
Hunters found his body naked in the snow. The body is that of Ben Wylie, the second-richest man in America, and it is found in a remote patch of northern Canada. Far away, in New York, the son of the Wylie family’s housekeepers tries to figure out how and why Ben died. The answer lies in the tortured history of the Wylie family, who built up their massive fortune over three generations. All of the Wylie men struggle with a secret: they are werewolves. The threads of their destinies, both financial and supernatural, lead twistingly but inevitably to the naked body in the snow and a final, terrible revelation.
The Hunger of the Wolf is a novel about what it means to be a man in a world of money. It’s about the pursuit of wealth through the rising tide of America in the twentieth century, seen through the sober lens of more recent economic times. It’s a novel about the innate nature of violence: The Wylie men struggle to control their inner rage, through physical restraint, psychotherapy, drugs, hedonistic abandon, and good old-fashioned denial. It’s a story of fathers and sons, about secrets that are kept in families, and about the cost of the tension between the public face and the private soul—the cruelty and loneliness and occasional joy of being a magical being in a quotidian world.
A brilliant mystery from page one, “The Hunger of the Wolf is simply one of the most observant and entertaining examinations of modern will-to-wealth that fiction has produced in recent years” (Miami Herald).
Author
Stephen Marche
Stephen Marche is a novelist and culture writer who has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Esquire, and many other outlets. His books include three novels, The Hunger of the Wolf, Raymond and Hannah, and Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, as well as The Unmade Bed and How Shakespeare Changed Everything. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.
Read more from Stephen Marche
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Reviews for The Hunger of the Wolf
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
1 rating1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An intriguing story. I liked the comparisons between the vapid lives of the New Yorkers, always desperate for the next thing, the next chance - with their ridiculously elaborate food - and the simple canned-peas Northern Alberta life of Jamie Cabot's mother ("She is a real person. I don't know if I've met another") and the Wylies.
This book has an interesting premise, but sometimes the language got in the way of the message. This may well have been deliberate, but here's an example of a sentence that got a bit overblown for my taste: Nobody could name that inequitable Utopia, the Shangri-la of the oligarchs where all things are possible with money, leaving the rest of us in the quotidian ruins of our squalid little lives to dream inchoately of their beautiful omnipotence.Actually, scrap what I just said. This is deliberate - it's Jamie's voice, not Marche's, and this language is typical of his complex, synthetic life. I'll just shut up now and give the book another star.
Book preview
The Hunger of the Wolf - Stephen Marche
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