Wolfish

By: Erica Berry

Narrated by: Lessa Lamb

Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

"Lessa Lamb narrates with a fine tone and timbre. She inhabits the youthful sound and elegant style of this layered audiobook. Her timing and sense of occasion add richness to its informed foray into all things wolf as she captures the drama, fear, and anxiety that underlie the immersive presentation."—AudioFile Magazine (Earphones Award Winner)

For fans of Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk and Mary Roach, Erica Berry’s WOLFISH blends science, history, and cultural criticism in a years-long journey to understand our myths about wolves, and track one legendary wolf, OR-7, from the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon

"Wolfish starts with a single wolf and spirals through nuanced investigations of fear, gender, violence, and story. A GORGEOUS achievement."—Blair Braverman, author of Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube

“This is one of those stories that begins with a female body. Hers was crumpled, roadside, in the ash-colored slush between asphalt and snowbank.”

So begins Erica Berry’s kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves, both real and symbolic. At the center of this lyrical inquiry is the legendary OR-7, who roams away from his familial pack in northeastern Oregon. While charting OR-7’s record-breaking journey out of the Wallowa Mountains, Erica simultaneously details her own coming-of-age as she moves away from home and wrestles with inherited beliefs about fear, danger, femininity, and the body.

As Erica chronicles her own migration—from crying wolf as a child on her grandfather’s sheep farm to accidentally eating mandrake in Sicily—she searches for new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world. What do stories so long told about wolves tell us about our relationship to fear? How can our society peel back the layers of what scares us? By strategically unspooling the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey, and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both, Erica bridges the gap between human fear and grief through the lens of a wrongfully misunderstood species.

Wolfish is for anybody trying to navigate a world that is often scary. A powerful, timeless, and necessary book for our current and future generations.

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.

©2023 Erica Berry (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"An exhilarating book—intricate, thoughtful, and thick with connections."—Megha Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning

"[A] worthy addition to the literature surrounding wolves."—Kirkus

"[A] wise and arresting debut about the wolves—real and symbolic—that haunt American life. Blending science writing with memoir and cultural criticism, Wolfish is a powerful exploration of predators and their prey delivered with an unflinching and vulnerable honesty.... a necessary environmental memoir: that which acknowledges fear in its ongoing pursuit of hope."—Vulture

Excellent for adhd

My adhd heart lived this book so much. The threads, stories, narration were wonderful. Thank you.

Phenomenal story!

A memoir beautifully woven in mythology, ecology and wonder. Brava! Looking forward to future publications! Please consider narrating your own work next time.

Meandering and disjointed series of essays

This book is less than the sum of its parts. A series of disjointed, meandering essays that do little justice to the purported actual central theme of the book.

It isn't really about wolves

This is a well researched book, there were parts that were thought provoking. Far too many quotes of other authors throughout!

I found the book disjointed, it would jump back and forth between a story from the author's life and stories about wolves in a way that seemed to lack reason.

The narrator has a very wistful tone that made it hard to get through.

disjointed story

I felt like this book jumped around between personal stories, anthropomorphic wolf stories and quotes from other authors. the author didn't do a thorough job weaving these story lines together. the narrator seemed to be trying too hard to evoke emotion in the words and paused between each word in some parts. I love wolf and nature books, but this missed the mark.