The Hunger of the Wolf

A “spellbinding” ( Publishers Weekly) literary novel with fangs: a sweeping, genre-busting tale of money, morality, and the American Dream—and the men and monsters who profit in its pursuit—set in New York, London, and the Canadian wilderness.

Hunters found his body naked in the snow. The body is that of Ben Wylie, the second-richest man in America, and it is found in a remote patch of northern Canada. Far away, in New York, the son of the Wylie family’s housekeepers tries to figure out how and why Ben died. The answer lies in the tortured history of the Wylie family, who built up their massive fortune over three generations. All of the Wylie men struggle with a secret: they are werewolves. The threads of their destinies, both financial and supernatural, lead twistingly but inevitably to the naked body in the snow and a final, terrible revelation.

The Hunger of the Wolf is a novel about what it means to be a man in a world of money. It’s about the pursuit of wealth through the rising tide of America in the twentieth century, seen through the sober lens of more recent economic times. It’s a novel about the innate nature of violence: The Wylie men struggle to control their inner rage, through physical restraint, psychotherapy, drugs, hedonistic abandon, and good old-fashioned denial. It’s a story of fathers and sons, about secrets that are kept in families, and about the cost of the tension between the public face and the private soul—the cruelty and loneliness and occasional joy of being a magical being in a quotidian world.

About the Author

Stephen Marche is a novelist and culture writer. For the past five years he has written a monthly column for Esquire magazine, “A Thousand Words About Our Culture,” as well as regular features and opinion pieces for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and elsewhere. His books include three novels, Hunger of the Wolf, Raymond and Hannah, and Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, as well as a work of nonfiction, How Shakespeare Changed Everything. He lives in Toronto with his wife and children.