Eskimo and white culture collide in this national bestselling novel of life in the contemporary Alaskan wilderness: "A magnificently realized story" (New York Times Book Review).
Ordinary Wolves depicts a life different from what any of us has known: Inhuman cold, the taste of rancid salmon shared with shivering sled dogs, hunkering in a sod igloo while blizzards moan overhead. But this is the only world Cutuk Hawcley has ever known. Born and raised in the Arctic, he has learned to provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading. And yet, though he idolizes the indigenous hunters who have taught him how to survive, when he travels to the nearby Inupiaq village, he is jeered and pummeled by the native children for being white.
When Cutuk ventures into the society of his own people, two incompatible realities collide, perfectly capturing "the contrast between the wild world and our ravaging consumer culture". In a powerful coming of age story, a young man isolated by his past must choose between two worlds, both seemingly bent on rejecting him (Louise Erdrich)
Winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize
"As a revelation of the devastation modern America brings to a natural lifestyle, it's a tour de force and may be the best treatment of the Northwest and its people since Jack London's works."-Publishers Weekly, starred review