This is a terrific book – highly recommended!
I could stop there but maybe you’d like to know a bit more.
The author writes beautifully and I knew he had me after the first two pages of the Prologue. I’d bet that the author makes a good first impression in person too, but he certainly does on the page.
The next 361 pages describe the author’s trek following the route (revealed by satellite tracking) of a young male Wolf from Slovenia to Italy by way of southern Austria and the Alps. Quite a walk for a Wolf and quite a walk for the author. Imagine, walking hundreds of kilometres knowing that a few years before a young Wolf had passed this very same way. What an insight into a fellow creature, and a fellow creature of a species loved and loathed by your own species.
We learn quite a lot about the Wolf as a species and something about this single individual, and obviously we learn some things (but not intrusively much) about the author and quite a bit about our own species. The conversations with people along the way (hunters, farmers, scientists and just people) are brilliant and aren’t simply about their opinions of Wolves but tell us much more about this part of Europe, rural and urban life, politics and human nature. We get all that because the author talks to people and they talk to him but Wolves don’t talk to us.
Why did this Wolf, Slavc, leave his birthplace when he did? We don’t really know. Why did he take the route he did rather than an infinite number of others? We don’t really know. Why did he stop where he did? We don’t completely know. But thanks to the tracking information and the author’s ground-truthing of the journey we feel we know this individual Wolf far better. The Wolf bits are fascinating, the people bits are fascinating too.
This will be a strong contender for my book of the year, come December: the writing is superb.
The cover? It’s a good cover despite the cluttering quotes – I’d give the cover 8/10 (9/10 without the quotes).
Lone Wolf – walking the faultlines of Europe by Adam Weymouth is published by Penguin Random House
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