"Let me tell you a story. I'll be your tale weaver, memory spinner, tell-tale-tit. I'll be the whisperer in the twilight who guides you to another world. But I have to warn you that the story I'm about to tell you - which I've learned from the wind, the stones, the rain - will surprise you and upset you, and make you wonder at it, and at me. And make no mistake (because you will). No matter how much the world I'm about to take you to looks like the world you think you understand, beneath its familiar surface lies a faerie tale, and one of the old sort: an eye-socket, thigh-bone, grit-stone history of a world that goes a long, long way beyond the confines of the merely human." Jack Wolf, Mammoth and Crow
The Faceless Men are on the move.
Dark forces swell within the Otherworld, while the Human world moves inexorably toward war.
Set in the wilds of Cornwall during the last months before the outbreak of World War 2, Jack Wolf's wonderful new novel traces the development of an unlikely friendship between of two children - one a Jewish refugee who has travelled from Berlin on the kindertransport, the other the neglected child of well-to-do British Fascists - as they struggle to make sense of an increasingly threatening and strange reality. As the adult world around them descends into chaos, Martin Stone and Leto Murray, the boy who talks to birds and the girl who can use her mind to travel into the Otherworld of Spirits that lies underneath this one, discover an older and deeper danger even than Hitler: deadly forces accidentally set into motion at the dawn of pre-history that are driving human history towards a catastrophic conclusion. Will Martin be able to pass on the faceless men's warning, or will their vital message go unheeded?
This beautiful and deeply thought provoking novel seamlessly weaves classical myth, animist philosophy, and modern storytelling together with its 1930s setting to explore the terrible consequences of confusion between extremism and love. Dealing unflinchingly with themes of love, loss, and motherhood, it asks us to consider what happens when the connections between human nature and human civilisation are severed. In a modern world threatened by Climate Change and a newly emboldened fascist ideology that has once again brought the continent of Europe to the brink of war, its publication could not be more timely.
Fans of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper will love this new faery tale from award-winning author Jack Wolf and brought out by exciting new publisher Aurochs Underground Press.
About the Author:
Jack Wolf's debut novel, The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones, was published to critical acclaim by Penguin Random House in 2013. It was listed for the Edinburgh Lit Festival Best Debut Novel and for the Polari Prize for Queer Fiction, and won the Authors' Club Best First Novel award. Jack taught Creative Writing at Bath Spa University for several years on the BA and prestigious MA in Creative Writing programmes. Jack now teaches on the Open University's online MA in Creative Writing and also offers freelance manuscript consultation and mentoring.
Mammoth and Crow is Jack's second novel. A third novel, The Devil and The Rainbow, is planned for publication in 2023. Dog Walking Weather, Jack's first poetry pamphlet, is also available from Aurochs Underground Press.
