The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall

Rachel Caine moves back to Cumbria after a decade spent protecting wolves on an Idaho reservation. Thomas Pennington – an earl – owns lots of the Lake District and is determined to reintroduce the grey wolf into the English countryside. Rachel runs the project, against a background of political and personal tumult: Scottish independence, the death of her mother, the unplanned birth of her child, hot sex with a vet.  

Sarah Hall’s fourth novel is a masterly thing, with characters so real they live like people inside your head. Hall captures Rachel’s emotional complexity with economy and precision, exploring grand themes of motherhood, power and wildness. The prose is mesmerising – from the expert detail of a handbrake croaking into position, to the description of the wolves moving like grey fire over the hills.

Rachel behaves like a real person: rough round the edges, unresolved. She’s kickass, for sure, but she’s never idealised. Through her, Hall examines the ways in which commitment creeps up on a life – instinctual motherhood, the modern relationship and the emotional forest of a fractured family.

None of that really gets to how good this book is. This reviewer had to stop in the street to finish a chapter, before the working day could begin. Only Hilary Mantel and Alice Munro have similar powers of storytelling.