Novels
- The Tenderness of Wolves (2006)
- The Invisible Ones (2011)
- Under A Pole Star (2016)
Novels Book Covers
Stef Penney Books Overview
The Tenderness of Wolves
A brilliant and breathtaking debut that captivated readers and garnered critical acclaim in the United Kingdom, The Tenderness of Wolves was long listed for the Orange Prize in fiction and won the Costa Award formerly the Whitbread Book of the Year. The year is 1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a tiny isolated settlement in the Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. Laurent Jammett had been a voyageur for the Hudson Bay Company before an accident lamed him four years earlier. The same accident afforded him the little parcel of land in Dove River, land that the locals called unlucky due to the untimely death of the previous owner.A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime scene and sees the tracks leading from the dead man’s cabin north toward the forest and the tundra beyond. It is Mrs. Ross’s knock on the door of the largest house in Caulfield that launches the investigation. Within hours she will regret that knock with a mother’s love for soon she makes another discovery: her seventeen year old son Francis has disappeared and is now considered a prime suspect. In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the crime and to the township Andrew Knox, Dove River’s elder statesman; Thomas Sturrock, a wily American itinerant trader; Donald Moody, the clumsy young Company representative; William Parker, a half breed Native American and trapper who was briefly detained for Jammett’s murder before becoming Mrs. Ross’s guide. But the question remains: do these men want to solve the crime or exploit it?One by one, the searchers set out from Dove River following the tracks across a desolate landscape home to only wild animals, madmen, and fugitives variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native American culture before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good. In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation, and humor into an exhilarating thriller; a panoramic historical romance; a gripping murder mystery; and, ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, an epic for the ages.
The Invisible Ones
Small time private investigator Ray Lovell veers between paralysis and delirium in a hospital bed. But before the accident that landed him there, he had promised to find Rose Janko. Rose was married to the charismatic son of a travelling gypsy family, Ivo Janko. When Ray starts to investigate her disappearance he’s surprised that her family are so hostile towards him. The Jankos have not had an easy past. They are a clan touched by tragedy either they are cursed, or they are hiding a terrible secret. Could it be that Rose’s discovery of that secret led to her disappearance all those years ago? Soon Ray wishes that he’d never asked the question. In a novel that is totally different from Stef’s extraordinary debut The Tenderness of Wolves, she shows herself once more to be a matchless storyteller.
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