Knopf Doubleday
February 2012
On Sale: February 14, 2012
400 pages ISBN: 0307595110 EAN: 9780307595119 Kindle: B0060AY8K2 Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
The place, the rugged coast of northern California. A bluff
high above the Pacific. A grand mansion full of beauty and
tantalizing history set against a towering redwood forest.
A young reporter on assignment from the San Francisco
Observer. . . an older woman, welcoming him into her
magnificent, historic family home that he has been sent to
write about and that she must sell with some urgency . . . A
chance encounter between two unlikely people . . . an
idyllic night-shattered by horrific unimaginable violence. .
.The young man inexplicably attacked-bitten-by a beast he
cannot see in the rural darkness . . . A violent episode
that sets in motion a terrifying yet seductive
transformation as the young man, caught between ecstasy and
horror, between embracing who he is evolving into and
fearing who-what-he will become, soon experiences the thrill
of the wolf gift.
As he resists the paradoxical pleasure and enthrallment of
his wolfen savagery and delights in the power and
(surprising) capacity for good, he is caught up in a strange
and dangerous rescue and is desperately hunted as "the Man
Wolf," by authorities, the media and scientists (evidence of
DNA threaten to reveal his dual existence). . . As a new and
profound love enfolds him, questions emerge that propel him
deeper into his mysterious new world: questions of why and
how he has been given this gift; of its true nature and the
curious but satisfying pull towards goodness; of the
profound realization that there are others like him who may
be watching-guardian creatures who have existed throughout
time and may possess ancient secrets and alchemical
knowledge and throughout it all, the search for salvation
for a soul tormented by a new realm of temptations, and the
fraught, exhilarating journey, still to come, of being and
becoming, fully, both wolf and man.