The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall
Faber £14.99
Rachel Caine is returning to home to Cumbria from her job monitoring wolves in Idaho for the first time in six years. The Earl of Annerdale, rich and eccentric, is determined to have the country’s best wolf expert working on his pet project. And her mother is dying. The Earl offers her a job overseeing the reintroduction of grey wolves to his estate but she initially refuses. Her resistance is soon overcome, however, and Rachel soon finds herself back in the landscape of her childhood, trying to negotiate the oddities of, and protests against, the wolf project and her own uneasy relationship with her brother and the shade of her mother.
It is a tale of returning and of borders. The wolves return to their ancestral home and to their place in our imaginations. In returning to the landscape of her childhood, Rachel is able to begin to rebuild her connection to her brother, and to start to make sense of her relationship with her mother. Borders are everywhere, from the wolf border of the title, to the border between England and Scotland at a time of upheaval, and as in all Hall’s work, the thin, sometimes permeable line between human, animal and landscape.
For fans of Angela Carter, Ted Hughes, Kathleen Jamie.