THE HUNGER OF THE WOLF

The Hunger of the Wolf is a literary novel with fangs: a sweeping, genre-busting tale of morality and money—and the men and monsters who profit in its pursuit—set in New York, London, and the Canadian wilderness. A breakout book from Stephen Marche, the provocative Esquire columnist whose last novel was described by the New York Times Book Review as “maybe the most exciting mash-up of literary genres since David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

The novel opens as hunters find the body of Ben Wylie, America's second-richest man, naked in the snow in remote Canada. His grandfather Dale Wylie began as a peddler in Pennsylvania and, after several successes and bankruptcies came to own hundreds of newspapers and radio stations. Dale’s son George converted the family business into the largest professional information company in the world. George’s son Ben oversaw and expanded the massive family holdings into multibillion dollars’ worth of real estate, oil, and information systems. While building their fortune, all of the Wylie men struggle with a secret: they are werewolves.

In post-crash New York, Jamie Cabot, the son of the Wylie family’s housekeepers, must figure out how and why Ben died. Cabot’s obsession with the family leads him back through three generations of their history. The threads of the Wylie men’s destinies, both financial and supernatural, lead twistingly but inevitably to the naked body in the snow and a final, terrible revelation.

Delving into the exclusive world of Manhattan socialites and art collectors, Wall Street titans and industry magnates, and the uses and abuses, dangers and intoxications of money, The Hunger of the Wolf is a literary novel whose serious themes are leavened with, but not defined by, a supernatural mystery.

Stephen Marche is the author of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (2007) and Raymond and Hannah (2005). He currently writes "A Thousand Words About Our Culture," a monthly column for Esquire magazine, which in 2011 was a finalist for the ASME National Magazine Award for Commentary, in addition to opinion pieces for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Salon.com, The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. He received a doctorate in Early Modern Drama in 2005 from the University of Toronto.