Wolf

At the age of eighteen, Wolf pulls the door of his student room shut behind him and travels as far north as his bank balance will allow, without telling anyone where he is. Six months after his disappearance, his lifeless body is discovered in a forest in northern Sweden. Detectives find his Moleskine notebook attached to the decaying corpse by a string. It contains an account of Wolf’s final journey, towards a self-chosen death.

Wolf wanted to be a writer; his sister Lara became one. In the autobiographical ‘Wolf’ she looks back, ten years later, on their childhood in a family with five children, on the turbulent months after Wolf’s disappearance and the even more turbulent years after his death. She combines her own story with fragments from Wolf’s diary and with snatches from the almost daily emails their father sent his son while he was missing.

‘Wolf’ is a rock-solid book about grief and profound sorrow, in which Taveirne expresses the devastating feeling of loss in light, perceptive writing. At the same time it’s also a book about the power of the imagination and the written word. ‘Wolf’ is, after all, inevitably Taveirne’s own interpretation of her brother’s life. Furthermore, on several occasions she comes up against the limits of what the imagination can do; ‘writing back’ to Wolf ultimately proves impossible. With this universal and lacerating story about her own brother, Taveirne leaves not a single reader unmoved.