U.S./Canada, Flatiron Books
“I immediately was absorbed not only by her knowledge of wolf behavior but also by the myriad ways in which she incorporated these lessons into a deep journey into herself...[a] beautifully written and passionate book that deserves wide, global attention.”
“Exhilarating”
“Far more than a book about an animal, this is a book about how fear shapes the world..brisk and essayistic, [it] makes for a compelling read.”
U.K. / Commonwealth edition, canongate books
Recommended by: Harpers Bazaar, TIME, Vulture, Salon, the Rumpus, Literary Hub, Powells Books, Reader’s Digest, Goodreads, Bustle, Book Riot, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, the Philadelphia Inquirer
Buy the audiobook, winner of a 2023 Earphones Award from Audiofile Magazine
Read an excerpt at The Guardian, Literary Hub, Debutiful, Oregon Humanities
"This is one of those stories that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank."
So begins Erica Berry's kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7's record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body.
As Erica chronicles her own migration--from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather's sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily--she searches for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world. What do stories so long told about wolves tell us about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both, Erica bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species.
Wolfish is for anybody trying to navigate a world that is often scary. A powerful, timeless, and necessary book for our current and future generations.
"Wolfish starts with a single wolf and spirals through nuanced investigations of fear, gender, violence, and story. A gorgeous achievement."
-Blair Braverman, author of Small Game and Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube