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An insomniac finds sleep and her feral self after a mysterious encounter with a wolf in this darkly funny novel of new motherhood
She cannot sleep. Ever since she had the baby, slumber has eluded her. Life has become one endlessly present moment of exhaustion and caregiving.
Looking for peace in the mountains, she packs up her family and moves to a borrowed house in a resort town. But there is unrest in the town, where locals are priced out in favour of rarely used vacation homes. There are elk in the driveway and the threat of bears lurking around every corner. And there are wolves.
On one wee-hours walk she encounters a wolf and then has the best sleep she’s had in a year. When she next encounters the wolf, he’s maybe a man. A shape-shifter? Either way, she’s convinced he’s the key to sleep, and maybe even to a profound spiritual awakening. She begins a wild affair with her wolfman, and soon begins to wonder whether she’s transforming into a wolf herself.
Is he really her salvation? Or has she completely lost it?
Praise for Follow the Wolfman:
‘Darkly funny and more than a little feral, Michelle Kaeser has written a true page-turner about a new mother pushed to the brink by her postpartum insomnia. In an entirely singular voice, the frustrations and anxieties of new parenthood are brought to the surface. I gobbled it down in one sitting.’ – Meredith Hambrock, author of She’s a Lamb!
Praise for The Towers of Babylon:
‘Michelle Kaeser has written a perfect classic for millennials. She captures us in all our overeducated, underemployed, anxious glory. At once devastating and funny, whip-smart and sexy, this is the definitive portrayal of a generation shipwrecked by post-recession capitalism. It left me winded.’ – Sigal Samuel, senior reporter at Vox and co-host of Vox's Future Perfect podcast, and the former religion editor at The Atlantic
‘With her absorbing prose, Kaeser captures the precariousness of our carefully constructed lives. She gets us exactly right: our secret fears and passions, our times. Unnervingly real and true, funny and provocative, The Towers of Babylon is an abnormally good book about normal people.’ – Emily Saso, author of The Weather Inside and Nine Dash Line
Michelle Kaeser was born in Toronto and now lives in Calgary. Her fiction and essays have appeared in publications across the country. She was a finalist for the inaugural HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, a three-time finalist in the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, and received honourable mentions in the Prairie Fire Fiction Contest and the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Contest. Her first novel, The Towers of Babylon, was published by Freehand Press in 2019.