Throw Me to the Wolves

From the Man Booker Prize–longlisted novelist, a shocking story of voyeurism, betrayal, and the gray areas between truth and fiction that reflects our era of tabloid media and fake news.

In the aftermath of Brexit, the body of a young woman is found by the river Thames, and the tabloids are aflame, accusing Mr. Wolphram, a former teacher and the perfect target for media monstering: mysterious, friendless, and eccentric.

Charged with investigating this crime is Ander, once a student of Mr. Wolphram's. As he interviews pupils who both defend and defame their oddball teacher, he must face a story from decades back that he has tried hard to forget. Ander recalls his best friend Danny, who disappeared from their elite English boarding school--a place of routine physical and psychological abuse--at the peak of IRA terror. In the midst of the present murder investigation, racked by suppressed memories, he also discovers something vital about Mr. Wolphram's true character.

Combining the momentum of classic crime fiction with the emotional depth of literary fiction, Throw Me to the Wolves explores the harrowing power of the modern media spectacle to distract from acts of ordinary violence, and the power of the ever-present newsfeed to drown out the boundary between truth and fiction. Faced with Wolphram's case, Ander must turn to his own memory, which proves the ultimate source of both mystery and revelation.

Patrick McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968 and lived in Bucharest in the years leading up to the Romanian revolution. He is a professor of French and comparative literature at Oxford University and a fellow of St. Anne's College. His first novel, The Last Hundred Days, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and his latest poetry collection, Jilted City, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. McGuinness lives in Oxford and North West Wales. His website is www.patrickmcguinness.org.uk.