Ordinary Wolves: A Novel (Milkweed National Fiction Prize). This item is unavailable.Ordinary Wolves: A Novel (Milkweed National Fiction Prize)

<div>A stirring and vivid novel about a white boy raised among natives on the harsh Alaskan tundra, <i>Ordinary Wolves</i> depicts a life different from what most people have ever known. In its pages, Cutuk, a boy equally uncomfortable in the ways of whites and Inupiaq, tells of his youth and young adulthood: of his father, who brought his family to Alaska from Chicago before Cutuk's birth; of his adopted Inupiaq family; and of the vast Arctic expanse beneath the frozen sky. It is here that Cutuk grows up - hunting, fishing, and living off the land, far away from the grinding, yet beckoning, machine of consumer culture.<br><br>Dispelling all mythical visions of Alaska, this evocative novel leads readers down its true trails, to feel the icy pinch of cold, to hunker as blizzards moan overhead. And in the twilit spaces from which animals appear are the wolves - and Cutuk's father - living their lives out on the tundra, unobtrusive, unapologetic, uninvolved in the world beyond.</div>

"Once in a great while a novel comes along that can shiver right down your bones and show you the world was always larger than you knew. This is just such an astonishing book: exotic as a dream, acrid and beautiful and honest as life, it sweeps back the material curtain of human contrivance to reveal what lies panting behind it. A piece of your heat and some longing, I promise, will stay in that other place forever."