So observant is Linda that you trust her instantly, but it's her own search for trust, for connection even at enormous cost, that will hold you to the final hour. Boyle 'First thing you see is the bracing intelligence of the book's young narrator - no big-eyed sentiments for Linda, raised amid blighted ideals in the ceaseless winters and vast swamps of northern Minnesota. Poetic, complex and utterly, heartbreakingly beautiful.'-T.C. What is literary authority, after all, but the ability to regularly, without apparent effort, make the most of every sentence, build feeling in every line and do it in such a way that is tough, tight, funny, and often brilliantly disruptive?'-Ben Marcus 'As exquisite a first novel as I've ever encountered. It knelt down, exhausted, and stayed.' So much is accomplished here, not least a kind of trust that this writer will make everything count, including the kind of data that is usually left for dead in a story.

What powerful tension and depth this provides! I'm so excited for readers to encounter the talent and roiling intelligence of Emily Fridlund.'-Aimee Bender 'Winter collapsed on us that year. Praise for HISTORY OF WOLVES: 'So delicately calibrated and precisely beautiful that one might not immediately sense the sledgehammer of pain building inside this book. Winner of the McGinnis-Ritchie award for its first chapter, Emily Fridlund's propulsive and gorgeously written History of Wolves introduces a new writer of enormous range and talent. As she struggles to find a way out of the sequestered world into which she was born, Linda confronts the life-and-death consequences of the things people do-and fail to do-for the people they love. Over the course of a few days, Linda makes a set of choices that reverberate throughout her life. It seems that her life finally has purpose but with this new sense of belonging she is also drawn into secrets she doesn't understand. And then the young Gardner family moves in across the lake and Linda finds herself welcomed into their home as a babysitter for their little boy, Paul. Grierson is charged with possessing child pornography, the implications of his arrest deeply affect Linda as she wrestles with her own fledgling desires and craving to belong. Isolated at home and an outlander at school, Linda is drawn to the enigmatic, attractive Lily and new history teacher Mr.

What powerful tension and depth this provides!'-Aimee Bender Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in the beautiful, austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. 'So delicately calibrated and precisely beautiful that one might not immediately sense the sledgehammer of pain building inside this book.

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund