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A Memoir
by Fatima Bhutto
From acclaimed journalist and novelist Fatima Bhutto, whose work has been hailed as "intense and powerful" (NPR), comes a searing, intimate memoir of grief, heartbreak, and what we owe the natural world—all learned from the dog who saved her life.
Fatima Bhutto was a teenager when her beloved father was assassinated. Ever since, she longed for a complete and happy family. Years later, still grappling with profound grief, she meets a charismatic man who offers her a new beginning—promising love, healing, and the children she's always dreamed of. But the dream soon unravels, revealing a toxic, manipulative relationship that holds her captive for over a decade.
By the spring of 2020, Fatima finds herself secluded in the English countryside, accompanied by her most loyal companion: Coco, a fiercely protective Jack Russell terrier. In the presence of nature and Coco's unwavering devotion, Fatima begins to question everything—and slowly finds the courage to confront her suffering and reclaim her voice.
In The Hour of the Wolf, Bhutto weaves reflections on love, loss, and healing with poignant memories of family, a yearning for motherhood, and meditations on literature, cinema, art, politics, and the wild world around her. Heartbreaking yet hopeful, this kaleidoscopic memoir is a testament to resilience, self-acceptance, and the restorative power of friendship—especially that of one small, brave dog.
"[Bhutto] weighs wolves and humans in the balance and finds humans wanting, with wolves and their descendants, our beloved dogs, helping her find a path to personal freedom and even, now, happiness…[an] ultimately winning blend of natural history and fraught personal memoir." —Kirkus Reviews
"Bhutto's meditative true story explores grief, loss, and healing within a melodic flow that shifts between the past, the lockdown, and the intervening years…With glimpses of hope throughout, Bhutto's latest is reminiscent of Safiya Sinclair's How to Say Babylon. Readers will root for her journey to happiness." —Library Journal
"With searing honesty, Fatima Bhutto explores the quiet devastations of love, and what happens when we wait for a change that never comes. I saw myself in this story and I know many others will too." —Rupi Kaur, New York Times bestselling author of Milk and Honey
"In The Hour of the Wolf, Fatima Bhutto asks the important questions: How to love well, wholly, how to be present for the self as a body in history, as a receptive system alongside other receptive systems? How does one become whole amidst smothering coercive control, political and domestic? How do we survive private grief amidst public joy, private joy amidst public grief? Toward the end of the book, Bhutto whispers the azan into the ears of a litter of newborn puppies, and it feels like a miniature climax of the psychospiritual maturation she charts throughout the book; only wilding through hell does one emerge with such unapologetic tenderness, earnest regard, such knowledge beneath what we call knowledge. I will love Coco (and Lama, and the other canine sages in this book) forever. I am an ardent student of Bhutto's vision." —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
"The Hour of the Wolf tells the story of Fatima Bhutto's extraordinary education in being tested—by life, by the need for love, by the fear of it, too, and by the horrors of war and contemporary political violence. And beside her, through it all, is the dog who taught her how to reach for something 'greater than grief'. Erudite and deeply moving, a memoir that is also the song you sing to make yourself brave." —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
This information about The Hour of the Wolf 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.
Fatima Bhutto is the author of the novels The Runaways and The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She is also the author of the nonfiction works New Kings of the World and Songs of Blood and Sword, which deals with her father's murder and the Bhutto family's history in Pakistani politics. Bhutto's journalism and essays have appeared in Granta, Zeteo, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Bhutto was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and grew up between Syria and Pakistan.
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