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by Stephen Marche
A breakout book from Stephen Marche, The Hunger of the Wolf is a novel about the way we live now: a sweeping, genre-busting tale of money, morality, and the American Dream - and the men and monsters who profit in its pursuit—set in New York, London, and the Canadian wilderness.
Hunters found his body naked in the snow. So begins this breakout book from Stephen Marche, the provocative Esquire columnist and regular contributor to The Atlantic, whose last work of fiction was described by the New York Times Book Review as "maybe the most exciting mash-up of literary genres since David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas." The body in the snow is that of Ben Wylie, the heir to America's second-wealthiest business dynasty, and it is found in a remote patch of northern Canada. Far away, in post-crash New York, Jamie Cabot, the son of the Wylie family's housekeepers, must figure out how and why Ben died. He knows the answer lies in the tortured history of the Wylie family, who over three generations built up their massive holdings into several billion dollars' worth of real estate, oil, and information systems despite a terrible family secret they must keep from the world. The threads of the Wylie men's destinies, both financial and supernatural, lead twistingly but inevitably to the naked body in the snow and a final, chilling revelation.
The Hunger of the Wolf is a novel about what it means to be a man in the world of money. It is a story of fathers and sons, about secrets that are kept within families, and about the cost of the tension between the public face and the private soul. Spanning from the mills of Depression-era Pittsburgh to the Swinging London of the 1960s, from desolate Alberta to the factories of present-day China, it is a bold and breathtakingly ambitious work of fiction that uses the story of a single family to capture the way we live now.
"Starred Review. Brilliant ... Marche has created a stunning, evocative, and impressionistic account of the ascent of wealth in the twentieth century... The Hunger of the Wolf could be Marche's breakthrough novel." - Booklist
"Despite the novel's account of their dramatic accumulation of a peerless fortune, the Wylies remain mysterious ... No word is out of place in this taut multigenerational tale, which takes some enjoyable supernatural turns." - Publishers Weekly
"Marche's observations on the growing hollowness of the moneyed class are trenchant and timely, but the strained metaphor of capitalists-as-wild-beasts feels out of place. An immaculately written but unsatisfying effort." - Library Journal
"An entertaining, curious journey into the beating black hearts that occupy the penthouse suites and those who aspire to join them. " - Kirkus
"A dazzling virtuoso piece. Marche turns the making of a family's fortune into a fascinating, bloody fairy tale." - Emma Donoghue, author of Room and Frog Music
"I read this book in basically a single sitting yesterday and have thought of little else since. It's the kind of novel that makes me want to turn the last page and immediately turn it over and start reading it again. The Hunger of the Wolf is a modern masterpiece: The Great Gatsby for the new Gilded Age." - James Frey
This information about The Hunger of the Wolf was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stephen Marche is a novelist and culture writer. For the past five years he has written a monthly column for Esquire magazine, "A Thousand Words About Our Culture," as well as regular features and opinion pieces for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and elsewhere. His books include two novels, Raymond and Hannah and Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, as well as a work of nonfiction, How Shakespeare Changed Everything. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.
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