Ordinary Wolves - 10th Edition by Seth Kantner (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award

"An astonishing book: exotic as a dream, acrid and beautiful and honest as life."--Barbara Kingsolver

After his mother flees back to the Lower 48, never to return, Cutuk Hawcly is raised along with his older sister and brother by his father, Abe, in an igloo on Alaska's tundra. Cutuk learns from the local indigenous community how to survive and provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading, yet he's still deemed an outsider by the Iñupiaq residents in the nearby village of Takunak because he's white. Despite his love for Alaska's wilderness and Dawna, a young woman in the village, he leaves for the city and its modern-world trappings. But when incompatible realities collide, Cutuk is forced to choose between two worlds, both seemingly bent on rejecting him.

A stunning, powerfully told, and authentically rendered coming-of-age novel, Ordinary Wolves brilliantly captures a young man finding his place in the world that's shifting in ways he never imagined.

Review Quotes

Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award

Booklist Top Ten Debut Novel

QPB New Voices Award nominee

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection

Book Sense Pick and Booksense Bestseller

"I've not read anything that so captures the contrast between the wild world and our ravaging consumer culture. Ordinary Wolves is painful and beautiful."

--Louise Erdrich

"An astonishing book."

--Barbara Kingsolver

"Here is a rare thing of beauty, a novel alive with detail about a life most of us would never experience."

--Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Discoveries"

"Ordinary Wolves--the first contemporary Alaska novel that seems true . . . the first one that matters."

--Nick Jans, ALASKA

"A magnificently realized story."

--Mark Kamine, New York Times Book Review

"Kantner takes all the hard lessons he learned growing up deep in the Alaskan wilderness and bundles them up into a commanding debut. . . . Kantner writes beautifully, but what's special about Ordinary Wolves is the author's unflinching portrayal of Alaska's social dynamic--the racial tensions, the contempt for big-game-hunting dentists, the use of cleaning solvents as booze. Messy, funny, and anything but noble, it's stridently human, and Seth Kantner gets all the blood, guts, pride, and spite down on the page."

--Outside

"Shockingly beautiful. Seth Kantner's Ordinary Wolves is to the mind what a chunk of pemmican made from dried caribou, cranberries, currants and rendered fat is to the body: It's going to stick to your ribs for a long time."

--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"This riveting first novel sets a new standard, offering a profound and beautiful account of a boy's attempt to reconcile his Alaskan wilderness experience with modern society. A tenderly and often beautifully written first novel. As a revelation of the devastation modern America brings to a natural lifestyle, it's a tour de force and may be the best treatment of the Northwest and its people since Jack London's works."

--Publishers Weekly

"This exciting story of a white boy growing up in a sod igloo in remote northern Alaska challenges any romantic ideas about life on the last American frontier. A valuable story about a boy trying to find his place in the world.

--School Library Journal

About the Author

Seth Kantner -- trapper, fisherman, photographer, igloo-builder, and acclaimed author of Ordinary Wolves -- was born in a sod igloo on the Alaskan tundra and raised on the land, wearing mukluks before they were fashionable, eating boiled caribou pelvis, and trading and living with the Iñupiaq, the people native to the region. Kantner attended the University of Alaska and the University of Montana, where he received a B. A. in journalism. Kantner's writings and photographs have appeared in Outside, Prairie Schooner, Alaska, and Reader's Digest, among other anthologies and publications. His work and writing have earned him the Whiting Writers Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and the Milkweed National Fiction Prize among many others. He lives with his wife and daughter in northwest Alaska.