A lonely teenager in rural northern Minnesota, Linda is desperate for connection and obsessed with both her enigmatic new neighbors and a classmate entangled in a scandalous relationship with a teacher. Narrating these seemingly disparate story threads is the adult Linda, who may have been villain, victim, or bystander in at least one tragedy. With lyrical prose and precise pacing, Fridlund builds tension and weaves a complex, multilayered morality tale rich in metaphor and symbolism. This haunting, meticulously crafted novel will inspire lengthy rumination on topics ranging from the meaning of its title to the power of belief.

Emily Fridlund grew up in Minnesota.  Her book will appeal to reads of Euphoria by Lily King, The Girls by Emma Cline, Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Fridlund about the book:

Q: The setting for History of Wolves—the bitter cold of northern Minnesota and the claustrophobic wilderness that Linda calls home—effectively becomes an additional character critical to the narrative. How did you prepare to write so extensively about Linda’s world?

A:  From the beginning, I thought of Linda's emotional landscape and northern Minnesota as closely linked. The novel’s setting is based on a region of Minnesota I visited around the time the initial story expanded into a novel—somewhere west of Duluth, north of Brainerd—but it is also an invented place, based on Linda’s unusual way of seeing and being in the world. The setting of the novel was, perhaps first and foremost, a way for me to get at and reveal my characters, Linda in particular. In the earliest drafts, I drew freely from my own experiences. I was a kid who loved being outside, roaming the scrappy suburban woods in my backyard and camping with my family up north. I was also inspired by my reading, especially Minnesota nature writers like Sigurd Olson and Helen Hoover, and also Barry Lopez’s marvelous work on wolves. In later drafts I did more specific research into details like species and tools, but in the beginning so much of capturing Linda’s voice was about capturing how she felt living in her world. That meant thinking of the setting as atmosphere as much as a concrete place.

Drawing on three decades of living among Native peoples, Kent Nerburn offers stories that reveal what we all can learn from the ways of Native Americans. With Voices in Stones, this bestselling author of Neither Wolf Nor Dog returns with a rare combination of personal memoir, cultural insight, and spiritual teaching that shines a light on our American past while offering lessons in our quest for a more humane American future. Nerburn has visited our stores a number of times, and his books are customer favorites.