After the Wolf

A gripping chronicle of a Mormon family in the American West, with shades of Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry

Electrified by a handshake with the prophet Joseph Smith, newly baptized Mormon Altus Pace is called westward with his fellow believers. In California, he is alarmed by the heavy-handed patriarchy and plural marriage codified by Smith’s successor, Brigham Young. Ignoring Young’s call to gather in Utah, Altus and his wife go to Texas and raise four sons in isolated piety. When they take in a stranded young woman, Altus succumbs to the practice he once despised. Aghast, his third son, Jacob, retreats west to build Pace Ranch—where his parents’ dream of faithful family life is reimagined while America comes of age around generations of Jacobs.

In 1994, when a young graduate of Brigham Young University is hired to work on the ranch, the fourth Jacob, a married man and the father of a young daughter, confronts the moral legacy of his ancestors and its congenital battles between fidelity and polygamy, feminism and patriarchy, modernity and tradition. Tested to the limit, the Pace family undertakes an agonizing attempt to reconcile their religion with the tension between love and desire and the demands of the world.

A saga of saints and sin, America and mania, After the Wolf is an epic with the scope, insight, and quiet majesty found only in the greatest novels of the American West. Through fury, through faith, through art and madness, this devastating debut explores the dark spaces between believing and belonging.