Book Launch: Children of the Wolf by Abby Geni
About this Event
We are always excited to welcome Abby Geni for an event! We will be celebrating the release of Children of the Wolf. For this event, Abby will be joined in conversation by Frances de Pontes Peebles.
A woman notices a pattern of men disappearing in her small town, reawakening memories of her childhood raised by a father obsessed with his violent Viking heritage.
As an adult, Liv leads a quiet life, tending to the beekeeping business that supports her and her brother. But when a dead body is discovered in her town, she is forced to grapple with a legacy of violence from when she was small.
As a child, she shared a home in rural Iowa with her brother Finn and their father Ulf. Swedish-born Ulf, a direct descendant of the infamous Erik the Red, raises his children as if they are Vikings. They are homeschooled, speak only Swedish, learn swordplay and archery, celebrate the Norse holidays, and worship the old gods with blood sacrifices.
But when Liv is fourteen, her family’s sanctum is broken apart by an FBI raid. Separated from their father, Liv and Finn must learn to adapt to normal life.
Now, twenty years later, Liv and Finn have changed their last names and moved to Haven, Michigan. Through her work as a beekeeper, Liv meets Penny, a secretive, unusual, beguiling woman. Just as her life is beginning to open up in new ways, Liv notices a strange and upsetting pattern in the area around Haven: men are disappearing. As she tallies up the missing, she senses disturbing similarities to her own father’s crimes.
While she's thrown back into the uncertainty she felt after Ulf's arrest, Liv, struggling to hold on to what she knows to be true, must decide how to proceed: whether to involve Finn and Penny in her suspicions, leave the whole matter alone, or take action to solve—and stop—the same kind of violence she always hoped to escape.
Abby Geni is the author of The Body Farm, longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Story Prize; The Lightkeepers, winner of the inaugural Chicago Review of Books Award of Best Fiction; The Wildlands, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Last Animal, a finalist for the Orion Book Award. Geni is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a recipient of the Iowa Fellowship.
Frances de Pontes Peebles is the author of the novels The Seamstress and The Air You Breathe. From Pernambuco, Brazil, she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is a 2020 Creative Writing Fellow in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, and has received a Fulbright grant and Brazil’s Sacatar Fellowship. Her short fiction has appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, and Guernica. She is proud to serve on the Board of the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.
Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are strongly encouraged for this event. We have one industrial air purifier, two smaller air purifiers, and four ceiling fans throughout our space. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. If you need a reserved seat or other access needs please email .
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