The Wolf Border, Hall informs us, is the equivalent of the Pale – a part-physical, part-imagined boundary between a capital and the wilderness that lies beyond. Rachel Caine, a pregnant “wolf-keeper”, returns from Idaho to her home county of Cumbria “to entertain a rich man’s whimsy” of reintroducing the animals onto a vast estate owned by a powerful but eccentric English lord. As she contemplates the life cycle of her charges, she is forced to come to terms with the death of her own mother, as well as the birth of her son.
Set at the time of the Scottish independence referendum, the fate of the fictional prime minister, Sebastian Mellor – “doomed . . . to be the premier on whose watch the nation dissolved” – eerily foreshadows the fall of David Cameron over the UK’s vote to leave the EU. An evocative and engaging exploration of life, death and the desire “to believe there will be a place, again, where streetlights end and wilderness begins”.
