Lone Wolf : Walking the Faultlines of Europe

Published 29/05/2025 | Hardback,
Description:

‘A wolf’s footsteps, followed; a continent’s faultlines, traced: Adam Weymouth has made a formidable, thousand-mile foot-journey, both in the tracks of a wolf and into the heart of human-animal relations in contemporary Europe — and written an exceptional book about it. His prose has a glinting precision of analysis and evocation to it; his intense curiosity and empathy extend across species boundaries as well towards people and landscapes’ Robert Macfarlane, author of UNDERLAND’A bold, beautiful, confronting journey charting a continent buckling under social and environmental pressure. A book about a wolf, about love and hate, and our conflicted relationship with nature and our fellow human beings. Timely and fascinating.’ Isabella Tree, author of WILDINGFrom the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award comes an epic walk across the Alps in the footsteps of a wolf, throwing unique light on Europe’s mountainous hinterlands at a moment of political and environmental change.

In 2011, a young wolf named Slavc set out from Slovenia. Tracked by GPS, he travelled a thousand miles through the Alps, arriving four months later on the Lessinian plateau, north of Verona. There had been no wolves in northern Italy for a century, but here he crossed paths with a female wolf on a walkabout of her own. A decade later and there are more than a hundred wolves back in the area, the result of their remarkable meeting.

In Lone Wolf, Weymouth walks Slavc’s path, examining the changes facing these wild corners of Europe. Here, the call to rewild meets the urge to preserve culture; nationalism and globalisation pull apart; climate change is radically changing lives; and migrants, too, are on the move.

The result is a multifaceted account of a region caught in a moment of kaleidoscopic flux, from an award-winning writer with a uniquely perceptive eye for detail.

PRAISE FOR ADAM WEYMOUTH’A really outstanding new contemporary British voice’ Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times’Adam Weymouth takes his place beside the great travel writers like Chatwin, Thubron, Leigh Fermor, in one bound’ Susan Hill, DBE’Dazzling’ Kamila Shamsie