A witty, charming and heartfelt novel from acclaimed author Thomas Wharton about the many fabled lives of a dog named Wolf—hunter, guardian, guide, healer, friend.
In a hard and hungry season thousands of years ago, a young wolf is turfed out of his pack and left to fend for himself among strange, clever new animals who walk on two legs, hunt with detachable claws and teeth, eat meat but wastefully discard the bones and tend fire as part of their pack.
Eventually, one of these young animals carefully approaches Wolf. He explains that he’s a human, and that his kind and Wolf’s kind aren’t so different: they hunt the same prey, they're hunted by the same predators and they need help surviving. The boy proposes a deal: Wolf will stand watch at night and alert the humans if danger approaches, and in exchange the humans will reward him with one meaty bone a day. Wolf agrees to the arrangement on a trial basis and over time grows closer to the boy, giving into an inexplicable urge to seek companionship with humans. And so, Wolf becomes dog.
In Wolf, Moon, Dog the award-winning author of The Book of Rain follows Wolf as he reincarnates through the ages, from Ancient Egypt to Alexandrian Greece to the Space Race and all the way to a dark future beset by climate change. Indeed, Wolf dies many times over, but each of his lives is uniquely meaningful, unleashing different aspects of humankind’s best friend. In Wharton's novel and fable, dogs are deeply empathetic creatures who experience a breadth of emotions and a desire for self-determination much the way we do, and who, also like us, struggle to reconcile conflicting instincts.
Dancing across genres and cultures, space and time, Wolf, Moon, Dog is as insightful about human nature as it is about canine behaviour, sure to delight dog lovers and show even readers immune to a dog's charm how much there is to learn from our canine counterparts.
THOMAS WHARTON has been published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, Japan and other countries. His first novel, Icefields, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book Canada and the Caribbean and was also a 2008 CBC Canada Reads pick. His next book, Salamander, was shortlisted for the 2001 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and was also a finalist for the Roger’s Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize the same year. In 2006, Wharton's collection of stories, The Logogryph, was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. His latest novel, The Book of Rain, was a finalist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize and the 2024 Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, and has sold rights in France and Russia. Wharton currently lives near Edmonton, Alberta.
ISBN: 9781039013964 Format: Hardback Pages: 272 Publisher: Random House of Canada Published: September 30, 2025
Canadian Read