The Wolves of Winter

By: Tyrell Johnson

Narrated by: Jayme Mattler

Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

Lynn McBride's guide to surviving in the Yukon:

Step One. Forget about life in Alaska. Don't think about microwaves, pizza, chocolate, movies, summer, the flu pandemic, or your dad - his sunken eyes, frail knuckles. That world's gone. Move on. You're a survivor.

Step Two. Learn to hunt, gut, clean, and cook animals without ralfing.

Step Three. Learn to live with the cold, the uncomfortable cabins, and the snow, snow, and more snow.

Step Four. Protect what's left of your family. Even if it means travelling with a stranger into the frozen north to help find and kill a man you know nothing about.

Step Five. Trust no-one.

Narrated by Lynn, a 23-year-old who was 12 when war and flu struck and she, her uncle, her mother and her brother left their town in Alaska for the remote Yukon territory. Since then she's grown up in isolation, a surly neighbour three miles away the only human contact outside her family.

When she runs into a stranger and his dog while out hunting one day everything changes. Jax stays with them while recovering from an injury and when, a week later, a group of four men show up looking for him he kills three of them and runs off to catch the fourth before he can bring more men back.

Lynn and her uncle Jeryl go with him, and Jax explains that they are bad men who want to run experiments on him because of his superhuman strength. Their eventual confrontation with the group of men changes their small family outpost forever.

©2018 Tyrell Johnson (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"With elements of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and TV's The Walking Dead, the book gets off to a gripping start, blending visceral thrills with existential reflections.... A stylishly written debut by a novelist to keep an eye on...." ( Kirkus Reviews)

"An exciting, fast-paced tale...Johnson is an excellent storyteller; the novel is full of action, suspense, and plot twists as the resilient characters fight for survival in a harsh winter wilderness." ( Publishers Weekly)

"If Jack London had written a post-apocalyptic, coming-of-age thriller, it might read something like this. Curl up with The Wolves of Winter by a warm fire, and set aside a day, because this is great, absorbing fiction, with one of the most appealing protagonists I've ever encountered. It deserves the widest possible audience." (Blake Crouch, author of the New York Times best-selling Dark Matter and the internationally best-selling Wayward Pines Trilogy)

It's The Empty Spaces Between

Tyrell Johnson's debut novel The Wolves of Winter is an impressively smooth aftermath survivalist tale set in the cold and remote Yukon wilderness. This stark yet beautiful background is brought to us by Lynne, a semi-tough 23 year old surviving with the remnants of her family after a catastrophic war and subsequent flu pandemic killed her father and most of the world's population. It's a tough but steady life they eke out for themselves until a young man brings trouble to their door.

Johnson's prose is smooth and simple and yet at times quite poetic, qualities that I found drew me into the story. It's a style and lead character that would suit a young adult audience in some ways as Lynne comes off the page as younger than her years due to her sheltered upbringing and isolation. That said, this is no soft tale, there are scenes of sexual and extreme physical violence so it is not a light-hearted option any more than trying to survive in the harsh beauty of the Yukon territory is.

Jayme Mattler seems to be a relatively new narrator to Audible and I'd say we're likely to hear a lot more from her in the future. She captures the wistful and youthful nature of Lynne expertly while doing the other characters full justice. She perhaps speaks at a slower rhythm than most with decent pauses at the right moments - a skill I think few narrators actually master. I really like it but of course if you do find it a bit slow the Audible app has a control for that.

I don't often include quotes but a couple from the goodreads site will give you an idea of the style of the prose:-

Grief never goes away. It just changes. At first it's like molten-hot lava dripping from your heart and hollowing you from the inside. Over time, it settles into your bones, your skin, so that you live with it, walk with it every day. Grief isn't the footprints in the snow. It's the empty spaces between.

Arrows are like snow or sorrow or secrets--they seem small and light, but their weight adds up.

I really enjoyed it even if the ending seemed just a little bit too neat for my ideal tastes. You'll see what I mean if you go for it. The good news is that a sequel is being considered though apparently it's really little more than a concept at this stage. Whether it comes or not this one stands on its own two feet and is well worth considering.

Poor

Shame the narrator tried to make it better than it is very dissapointing such a opportunity .
Good to fall asleep to
Q