Wolf Bells - by Leni Zumas (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The acclaimed author of Red Clocks returns with a biting, lyrical novel about an intergenerational group home run by an ex-musician determined to make a place for those without one

On a bluff above a river rises The House, where elderly and disabled residents live alongside young people who help out in exchange for free rent. The community is led by a former punk singer who never wanted to be responsible for anyone yet now finds herself the caretaker of this precarious collection of lives. It's not a family, exactly, but it's got the complicated, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious, dynamics of kinship.

When two kids--Nola and her little cousin James--show up on The House's back porch in need of refuge, the whole experiment is thrown into question. All are welcome here, or that was the idea. But the authorities are looking for these children, and The House's finances are teetering on the edge.

Zumas's long-anticipated third novel wrestles with America's crisis of care in a taut, aching, polyphonic tale that moves as fast as the crackling comebacks that fly between The House's residents over breakfast. As the rules of the outside world start to press in on this safe haven, readers will find themselves asking, what would the world look like if everyone had a place to belong?

Review Quotes

"Leni Zumas writes the truths we pretend we don't know, in a country determined to cultivate hyper individuality as the pinnacle of success. Wolf Bells insists that you ask why empathy and compassion are considered the lesser currencies. With the precision of a cartographer of the human heart, her novel navigates the ways the oldest and the youngest, the queer and the marginalized are forced to live along the fault lines of precarity. And with the tenderness of an attentive and honest lover, she guides us towards a world that is not only better but possible."--Mona Eltahawy, author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls

Praise for Leni Zumas:

"[A] lyrical and beautifully observed reflection on women's lives...Highly absorbing...Zumas is a skillful writer, expertly keeping each of her characters in balanced motion." --Naomi Alderman, New York Times Book Review

"Leni Zumas here proves she can do almost anything. Her tale feels part Melvillian, part Lydia Davis, part Octavia Butler-but really Zumas's vision is entirely her own. Red Clocks is funny, mordant, political, poetic, alarming, and inspiring-not to mention a way forward for fiction now." --Maggie Nelson

"Strange and lovely and luminous. I loved Red Clocks with my whole heart." --Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners

"Complex and heartbreaking...a fascinating and unsettling exploration of the limits society can place on women's bodies." --Samantha Irby, Marie Claire

"This provocative exploration of female longing, frustration and determination couldn't be more timely, and yet there's nothing fleeting about it. With Red Clocks, Zumas has written a novel that's political without being doctrinaire, that expands the dimensions of our most pressing social debate." --Ron Charles, Washington Post

"Chillingly relevant." --People

"Leni creates worlds so vivid and fever-bright that you forget you're reading words on a page." --Karen Russell
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"Wolf Bells will make you weep, I promise. Weep for radical possibilities of community. Weep for the cruelty of systems. Weep for the deep, fully human characters present in these pages. This novel is a kaleidoscope of place, characters, histories, and emotional connections so truly rendered that finishing it feels like saying goodbye to lifelong friends. I am always blown away by Leni Zumas, who is, hands down, one of the finest novelists writing today. This is a novel that will be read for generations."--Emme Lund, author of The Boy with a Bird in His Chest

"From the first sentence, you know you're in the hands of a novelist with the ear of a very good poet... A delight to read. It stands out as a book that features the interior voices of children, middle-aged women, and an elderly woman with equal verve... A tender and well-told story about the meaning of family."--Kirkus Reviews

"At once a fable, a cautionary tale, a sitcom, an elegy, and a no-frills utopian roadmap, Wolf Bells howls with the thrill of life and death intertwined. This is a brave book about trauma and persistence, aging and intergenerational kinship, and the frustration, conflict, and connection in caring for one another. Reshaping the world out of a broken history, Leni Zumas shows us how to dream."--Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art

"Unflinching, hilarious, and radical. In Wolf Bells, Leni Zumas has written the most humane of books; an essential and audacious novel that we need, urgently, in these fearful, fearsome times. Wolf Bells challenges us to imagine a new way of living; in true community, mutually caring and compassionate and free to speak our dissent. I would love to live in The House, the fictional residence Zumas has created, with all its aches and pains and complications and tender, precarious solidarity."--Miriam Toews, bestselling author of Fight Night and Women Talking

About the Author

Leni Zumas was a finalist for the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Her bestselling novel Red Clocks won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Neukom Award for Speculative Fiction. The novel was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and was named a Best Book of 2018 by The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and the New York Public Library. Vulture called it one of the "100 Most Important Books of the 21st Century So Far." Zumas's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Granta, Guernica, The Cut, Tin House, and elsewhere. She lives in Oregon and teaches in the creative writing program at Portland State University.