Living Off the Country
The Snow Child

Ordinary Wolves

Ordinary Wolves depicts a life different from what any of us has known: Inhuman cold, the taste of rancid salmon shared with shivering sled dogs, hunkering in a sod igloo while blizzards moan overhead. But this is the only world Cutuk Hawcley has ever known. Born and raised in the Arctic, he has learned to provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading. And yet, though he idolizes the indigenous hunters who have taught him how to survive, when he travels to the nearby Inupiaq village, he is jeered and pummeled by the native children for being white.

When Cutuk ventures into the society of his own people, two incompatible realities collide, perfectly capturing “the contrast between the wild world and our ravaging consumer culture”. In a powerful coming of age story, a young man isolated by his past must choose between two worlds, both seemingly bent on rejecting him (Louise Erdrich).

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • Ellen Bryant Voigt takes on a monumental challenge: to conjure up the influenza pandemic of 1918-19.

  • The obstacles to a mixed-race relationship between a son of the nobility and a woman of African ancestry.

  • This is the story of two women who find resistance and freedom in literature.  

  • On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.