Catherine Taylor admires a sensory novel that imagines the reintroduction of wolves to the English countryside
Of Sarah Hall’s recent fiction, her collection The Beautiful Indifference and “Mrs Fox”, which won the 2013 BBC Short Story Award, show an interest in the similarities between human and animal – either through evolution or transformation.
In “Mrs Fox”, a man witnesses his wife’s transmogrification into a fox. Amid the confusion of loss he finds solace in his determination to protect the creature she has become against the incursions of urban expansion. Hall’s new novel, The Wolf Border, while rooted in reality rather than fable, continues to explore this theme of mutability, this time in terms of “rewilding” – restoring wolves to England’s countryside after 500 years.
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