The Wild Hunt
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4.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A BuzzFeed, LitHub, Tor, and Library Journal Best Book of Summer
An NPR, CrimeReads, and Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2022
Longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
"An eerie, melodic debut." —The New York Times Book Review
The islanders have only three rules: don’t stick your nose where it’s not wanted, don’t mention the war, and never let your guard down during October.
Leigh Welles has not set foot on the island in years, but when she finds herself called home from life on the Scottish mainland by her father’s unexpected death, she is determined to forget the sorrows of the past—her mother’s abandonment, her brother’s icy distance, the unspeakable tragedy of World War II—and start fresh. Fellow islander Iain MacTavish, an RAF veteran with his eyes on the sky and his head in the past, is also in desperate need of a new beginning. A young widower, Iain struggles to return to the normal life he knew before the war.
But this October is anything but normal. This October, the sluagh are restless. The ominous, birdlike creatures of Celtic legend—whispered to carry the souls of the dead—have haunted the islanders for decades, but in the war’s wake, there are more wandering souls and more sluagh. When a young man disappears, Leigh and Iain are thrown together to investigate the truth at the island’s dark heart and reveal hidden secrets of their own. Rich with historical detail, a skillful speculative edge, and a deep imagination, Emma Seckel’s propulsive and transporting debut The Wild Hunt unwinds long-held tales of love, loss, and redemption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young man's disappearance rouses old superstitions in Seckel's intoxicating and atmospheric debut. Several years after the end of WWII, the death of Leigh Welles's father brings her back to the Scottish island she grew up on and leaves her feeling unmoored ahead of the arrival of the "sluagh," a flock of supposedly haunted crows that menace the island each October when "the border between this world and the next" is believed to be most porous. Rumored to "carry the dead's souls," the birds have been growing more aggressive, killing farm animals and attacking a schoolgirl, since the war took the lives of many of the island's young men. When Leigh's family friend Hugo vanishes after the annual festival to scare away the sluagh, the locals suspect the birds of evildoing and take Hugo for dead after a thorough search of the small island comes up empty. Unwilling to give up so easily, Leigh joins forces with Iain MacTavish, a war hero and widower, to find Hugo, in the process uncovering forces stranger than either had imagined. Seckel's descriptions evocatively conjure the roiling dread that permeates the island ("The sluagh had grown so numerous that their once elegant ballets in the air had blacked out the sky. Great unnatural clouds"), underscoring the elegiac reflections on grief and the toll of war. This moody meditation delivers.
