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, Altus Pace, a newly baptized Mormon, is called westward with his fellow believers. In California, though, 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 to raise four sons in isolated piety. But when they take in a stranded young woman, Altus succumbs to the practice he once despised. Aghast, Altus’s third son, Jacob, retreats west to build Pace Ranch––where his father’s dream of pious, monogamous family life could be reimagined.

As America comes of age around them, four consecutive generations of Jacob Paces painstakingly observe the moral legacy of their ancestors. Within them the old, congenital battles wage between polygamy and fidelity, patriarchy and feminism, tradition and modernity. In 1994, with the ranch now occupied by Jacob IV, his wife Tanya, and daughter Willow, history threatens to repeat itself with the arrival of Kelly, a young graduate of Brigham Young University.

Alongside Kelly looms the Pace’s inherited curse. Jacob’s idealism is dimmed as he confronts the choice between love and desire. Tested to the limits, the Pace family undertakes an agonizing attempt to reconcile their religion with the demands of the world and man’s inherent nature.

A saga of saints and wolves, magic 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 taps into the deepest recesses of the search for belief and belonging in the religious embers of an evolving nation.