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

  • In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. This is the unforgettable story of how Christopher Johnson McCandless came to die.

  • Nothing in the world soothes the soul better than Gospel music.

  • In James, when the enslaved Jim learns he is to be sold in New Orleans, he hides on Jackson Island to devise a plan for escape. Meanwhile, Huck Finn, having faked his own death, embarks on a perilous journey down the Mississippi River, intertwining their fates as they confront themes of freedom and agency in a reimagined narrative of American literature.

    Read More about "James"...

  • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by the author.