Inside the Wolf

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By Amy Rowland

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$18.99

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$24.99 CAD

A haunting, “exquisitely written” novel that explores the true costs of tradition, gun ownership, masculinity, and Southern mythmaking through the lens of an accidental shooting that reverberates across generations (Fiona McFarlane, author of The Night Guest).​

Rachel Ruskin never intended to return to her family’s tobacco farm in Shiloh, North Carolina. But when her academic career studying Southern folklore in New York City flames out, she has no choice. Back in her hometown in the wake of family loss, she is alone, haunted by memories, by ghosts, and by Shiloh’s buried history of racism and violence.

When another child is accidentally shot and killed, however, Rachel can no longer avoid confronting her own past wrongs; nor can she continue to hold herself apart from her community. How can the people of Shiloh reconcile their love of hunting and their belief in tradition with the loss of more children? How can she find a way back to those she grew up loving? Drawn into the rhythms of Shiloh and in search of a place to be-long, Rachel must question everything she grew up believing and at the same time find a way to accept those around her.

Haunting, fierce, and urgently topical, Inside the Wolf is a page-turning and redemptive novel about masculinity, guns, violence—and the American past. 

  • “Devastating and moving. An unsparing glimpse into a community fractured by its troubled past; a story populated by those seeking salvation from the traumas that haunt them. This is a novel that stuck with me long after I’d finished reading.”
    Nathan Harris, author of The Sweetness of Water
  • “At once elegiac and hopeful, Inside the Wolf is a raw, moving meditation on the dangerous myths we make as families and communities. A wise book, exquisitely written.”
    Fiona McFarlane, author of The Night Guest and The Sun Walks Down
  • “There may or may not be wolves in North Carolina but they haunt Rachel, the narrator and, finally, the heroine of Inside the Wolf. I love the cunning structure of this novel and the wonderful intelligence with which Amy Rowland explores what it means to live in a place where everyone knows your past. I couldn’t wait to see what her richly imagined characters would do next.”
    Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field
  • “Inside the Wolf is a compulsively readable meditation on regret, grief, and the love/hate relationship so many of us have with our home-places. Rowland’s tight, propulsive prose carries us to a brilliantly realized place that examines concepts of history, myth, and folklore through the lens of a complex, endearing main character. This novel is hard to put down and stays with you long after the last page is turned.”
    Silas House, author of Lark Ascending
  • “A cycle of 'history, suffering, shame, again' rattles through Inside the Wolf, Amy Rowland’s wrenching sophomore novel, set in Shiloh, N.C. . . . Ghost stories and folksy tales, as well as novels, embody a history worth exploring. If the truth is subject to debate, perhaps we’re only left with stories to set us free. Inside the Wolf is a vital Southern novel that speaks to a violent American legacy.”
     
    New York Times Book Review

On Sale
Jul 9, 2024
Page Count
256 pages
Publisher
Algonquin Books
ISBN-13
9781643756318

Amy Rowland

About the Author

Amy Rowland is the author of two novels. The Transcriptionist, (Algonquin 2014) received the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Norman Mailer Center, and the Sewanee Writers Conference. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Literary Hub, New Letters, and elsewhere. She is a former editor at the New York Times Book Review and she is currently a lecturer at UC Berkeley. She has also taught at Princeton University and at The School of The New York Times.

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