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The acclaimed author of Red Clocks returns with a biting, lyrical novel about an intergenerational group home run by an ex-musician determined to make a place for those without one.
On a bluff above a river rises The House, where elderly and disabled residents live alongside young people who help out in exchange for free rent. The community is led by a former punk singer who never wanted to be responsible for anyone yet now finds herself the caretaker of this precarious collection of lives. It's not a family, exactly, but it's got the complicated, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious, dynamics of kinship.
When two kids—Nola and her little cousin James—show up on The House's back porch in need of refuge, the whole experiment is thrown into question. All are welcome here, or that was the idea. But the authorities are looking for these children, and The House's finances are teetering on the edge.
Zumas's long-anticipated third novel wrestles with America's crisis of care in a taut, aching, polyphonic tale that moves as fast as the crackling comebacks that fly between The House's residents over breakfast. As the rules of the outside world start to press in on this safe haven, readers will find themselves asking, what would the world look like if everyone had a place to belong?
"From the first sentence, you know you're in the hands of a novelist with the ear of a very good poet… A delight to read. It stands out as a book that features the interior voices of children, middle-aged women, and an elderly woman with equal verve… A tender and well-told story about the meaning of family." —Kirkus Reviews
"As Zumas subtly unwraps Caz's motivations for establishing the house and reveals her hidden connection to the children, the story builds to an oblique but powerful meditation on the comfort and instability of found family. This packs a punch." —Publishers Weekly
"At once a fable, a cautionary tale, a sitcom, an elegy, and a no-frills utopian roadmap, Wolf Bells howls with the thrill of life and death intertwined. This is a brave book about trauma and persistence, aging and intergenerational kinship, and the frustration, conflict, and connection in caring for one another. Reshaping the world out of a broken history, Leni Zumas shows us how to dream." ―Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art
"Unflinching, hilarious, and radical. In Wolf Bells, Leni Zumas has written the most humane of books; an essential and audacious novel that we need, urgently, in these fearful, fearsome times. Wolf Bells challenges us to imagine a new way of living; in true community, mutually caring and compassionate and free to speak our dissent. I would love to live in The House, the fictional residence Zumas has created, with all its aches and pains and complications and tender, precarious solidarity." ―Miriam Toews, bestselling author of Fight Night and Women Talking
This information about Wolf Bells was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Leni Zumas was a finalist for the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. Her bestselling novel Red Clocks won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Neukom Award for Speculative Fiction. The novel was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and was named a Best Book of 2018 by The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and the New York Public Library. Vulture called it one of the "100 Most Important Books of the 21st Century So Far." Zumas's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Granta, Guernica, The Cut, Tin House, and elsewhere. She lives in Oregon and teaches in the creative writing program at Portland State University.
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