Published in 2023
238 pages
Amy Rowland‘s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn and is a staff editor at The New York Times Book Review. The Transcriptionist is her first novel, and she does not know why she hasn’t written others by now.
What is this book about?
This haunting and timely novel explores the true costs of tradition, secrets, and Southern mythmaking through the lens of an accidental shooting that reverberates across generations.
Rachel Ruskin never intended to return to her family’s tobacco farm in Shiloh, North Carolina. But when her academic career studying Southern folklore in New York City flames out, she has no choice. Back home, her parents killed in a car accident, her beloved brother Garland dead by suicide, she is left alone, haunted by the memories of the accidental gun death of her childhood best friend; and haunted by the ghosts of secrecy, of tainted soil, of wolves and witches and untold stories.
When another child in the community is accidentally killed by a gun, however, she can no longer keep her own memories at a distance, her family secrets buried. How can the people of Shiloh carry on—with their cherished love of hunting and guns, and with the loss of more children at the same time? Drawn back into the rhythms of Shiloh and in search of family and a place to belong, Rachel must acknowledge the culture she comes from, the people and the traditions she grew up with, and at the same time also question those traditions and the perniciousness of guns.
Rich with the rhythms of rural life and the landscape of the South, Inside the Wolf is a fierce, lyrical, and gorgeously redemptive novel about the myths of masculinity, guns, violence—and ultimately, the American past.
