Publisher's Synopsis
Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Shortlisted, Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize
A National Post Best Book of 2015
"The Hunter and the Wild Girl is powerful, almost elemental storytelling, an achievement not only of craft but of raw emotion. It pulses with vitality, building to a stunning, shattering conclusion." -- Robert Weirsema, Vancouver Sun
"A rich, immersive experience. Pauline Holdstock's is the kind of prose you get lost in." -- National Post
The story begins with the crack of splintered boards and bones as a feral girl crashes out of the hut where she's been held against her will and into the scrubland of southern France. Townsfolk chase her to the edge of a deep gorge. She leaps and vanishes into legend -- and into the territory of Peyre Rouff, a once-renowned hunter who spends his days fending off his own demons in an abandoned ch?teau.
Pauline Holdstock sets this absorbing novel in the blurry territory between myth and reality. The girl and the hunter inhabit radically different worlds. The wild girl's is rooted in the physical, a source of food and danger, Rouff's in the cerebral, an existence patterned to prevent him from the destruction of despair.
When their two worlds unexpectedly collide, this odd pair of outsiders forms an unlikely bond. The girl's untamed spirit and volatility shakes the hunter from his solitude. The hunter's unexpected kindness provides the girl with a sense of connection. But when the wider world learns of the girl's presence, Rouff is forced to confront both his choices and their consequences.
Wild and unpredictable, lush and sensually evocative, The Hunter and the Wild Girl courses with mythical life blood, resonant, disquieting, and fathoms deep.
