Ordinary Wolves: A Novel

Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award

“An astonishing book: exotic as a dream, acrid and beautiful and honest as life.”—Barbara Kingsolver

After his mother flees back to the Lower 48, never to return, Cutuk Hawcly is raised along with his older sister and brother by his father, Abe, in an igloo on Alaska’s tundra. Cutuk learns from the local indigenous community how to survive and provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading, yet he’s still deemed an outsider by the Iñupiaq residents in the nearby village of Takunak because he’s white. Despite his love for Alaska’s wilderness and Dawna, a young woman in the village, he leaves for the city and its modern-world trappings. But when incompatible realities collide, Cutuk is forced to choose between two worlds, both seemingly bent on rejecting him.

A stunning, powerfully told, and authentically rendered coming-of-age novel, Ordinary Wolves brilliantly captures a young man finding his place in the world that’s shifting in ways he never imagined.

Seth Kantner is a commercial fisherman, writer, and wildlife photographer, born and raised in northern Alaska. In addition to his novel, Ordinary Wolves, and his essay collection, Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska, his writings and photographs have appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Orion, Smithsonian, Adventure Journal, Alaska, and other literary journals and anthologies.