Throw Me to the Wolves

A magnificent second novel from the Booker-longlisted author

Throw Me to the Wolves is, on the face of it, a made-for-TV procedural police drama… Scratch the surface, however, and all of Britain’s restless undercurrents are churning away… this is literary fiction as it should be: in stylish, surprising, lyrical sentences we are forced to confront the hidden power structures, public and private, that control our everyday lives. It’s reminiscent of Edward St Aubyn, not only in its pillorying of the elite, but the pleasure McGuinness takes in having his characters say clever things. It’s also a proper page-turner.

This is a writer worth knowing… [McGuinness] combines elegant prose with caustic commentary on romance, education and crime… most people can write for a lifetime and not produce so perfect a sentence.

Blisteringly effective, written with an almost hallucinogenic clarity… Throw Me to the Wolves is intensely powerful.

An extraordinary writer of great compassion, McGuinness combines a mesmerising crime novel with a forensic look at the brutalising mechanisms of the British Public School system. Stunning.

An absorbing novel… on virtually every page, there are perfectly judged descriptions that reveal something about the world.

This second novel from Man Booker-longlisted McGuinness is a compassionate, funny and ultimately moving indictment of the gutter press, social media and boarding schools.

Throw Me to the Wolves could be described as a crime novel or as a State of the Nation novel. It fits into both those categories, but it offers much more than such convenient labels would suggest. It's a book seriously concerned with, and about, people who function on the fringe of society. Patrick McGuinness is an observant and reflective storyteller of a special kind.

A big, serious, elegantly written, darkly entertaining study of what school does to us, and how life afterwards can turn into a nightmare. McGuinness is a novelist of the old school, where the best and most lasting lessons were taught.

Intelligent and troubling… [Throw Me To The Wolves] invites reflection about the state of morality today, about the lust for witch-hunts and the zeal to punish.

McGuinness plays… [the plot] out beautifully, allowing each aspect of the story to resonate meaningfully with the others… [he lets] the story unspool at its own pace while he explores all its facets in clean prose polished to the point of translucence.

McGuinness is an intelligent and thoughtful writer, and his portrait of detective Ander is fully of wry observations about modern life and societal change.

Thoughtful, sometimes provocative… at the heart of [Throw Me to the Wolves] is a moving meditation on childhood and the ways in which it lives on in all of us.

Born in Tunisia in 1968, Patrick McGuinness is the author of one previous novel, The Last Hundred Days, which was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award and won the 2012 Wales Book of the Year Award. His other books include two collections of poems, The Canals of Mars (2004), and Jilted City (2010), and Other People’s Countries (2015), which won the Duff Cooper Prize and was the Wales Book of the Year. He is a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where he lectures in French.

**WINNER OF THE ENCORE AWARD 2020** 
 
'This is literary fiction as it should be: in stylish, surprising, lyrical sentences we are forced to confront the hidden power structures, public and private, that control our everyday lives' The Times 
 
A young woman has been murdered, and a neighbour, a retired teacher from Chapleton College, is arrested. An eccentric loner - intellectual, shy, a fastidious dresser with expensive tastes - he is the perfect candidate for a media monstering. 
 
In custody he is interviewed by two detectives: the smart-talking, quick-witted Gary, and his watchful colleague, Ander. Ander is always watchful, but particularly now, because the man across the table is his former teacher - Michael Wolphram - whom he hasn't seen in nearly 30 years. 
 
As the novel proceeds, we watch Wolphram's media lynching as ex-pupils and colleagues line up to lie about him. In parallel, we read Ander's memories of his life as a young Dutch boy in 80s England. Another outsider, another loner in a school system rife with abuse and bullying, Ander has another case to solve: the cold case of his own childhood. 
 
Though it deals with historical abuse and violence in schools, and the corrupt power of the popular media, Throw Me to the Wolves is about childhood and memory. A perceptive and pertinent novel of our times, beautifully written and psychologically acute, it manages to be both very funny and - at the same time - shatteringly sad. 
 
*LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA GOLD DAGGER 2020* 
*A TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020*

A Journey into Memory

Other People's Countries

A very special book of short, Proustian pieces on childhood and how the places of our childhood are embedded in us. 
 
Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize 
Winner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year Award 
Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize 
Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize

McGuinness is a marvellous writer... On every page there are breathtakingly gorgeous images, similes, metaphors.

McGuinness has written the great book on Belgium and modern memory, or even Belgium and modern being. He takes his place among those singers and painters of the haunted, the melancholy, the diminished, the caricatural, the humdrum.

Lyrical and evocative... This is a very Proustian memoir, whose effect will be to drive the reader into contemplation of their own half-forgotten childhood home.

A rich analysis of home and homelessness.

This book had a powerful effect on me... Sometimes hilarious, sometimes freighted with tragedy.

For Patrick McGuinness memories are electrical storms of the mind.

[McGuinness] is the best advocate for Belgium since Poirot and Tintin... Fascinating, charming, poignant.

An unusual and striking foray into the past... Powerful universal observations.

McGuinness’s prose trembles on the edge of poetry, occasionally indeed tipping gently over into it… Spellbinding… Beautifully written.

Lyrical and episodic… A haunting memoir

Born in Tunisia, Patrick McGuinness is the author of The Last Hundred Days, which was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award and won the 2012 Wales Book of the Year Award and the 2012 Writers’ Guild Prize for Fiction. His other books include two collections of poems, The Canals of Mars (2004), and Jilted City (2010), He is a Fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford, where he lectures in French.

Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize 
Winner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year Award 
Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize 
Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize 
 
Let me take you down the thin cobblestoned streets of the Belgian border town of Bouillon. Let me take you down the alleys that lead into its past. To a town peopled with eccentrics, full of charm, menace and wonder. To the days before television, to Marie Bodard’s sweetshop, to the Nazi occupation and unexpected collaborators. To a place where one neighbour murders another over the misfortune of pigs and potatoes. To the hotel where the French poet Verlaine his lover Rimbaud, holed up whilst on the run from family, creditors and the law. 
 
 
This exquisite meditation on place, time and memory is an illicit peek into other people’s countries, into the spaces they have populated with their memories, and might just make you revisit your own in a new and surprising way.

Patrick McGuinness

This is McGuinness's best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd

An eloquent fusion of the delicate and the direct

McGuinness has a delightfully distinctive voice… His buoyant imagination always carries the day… He can be breathtakingly simple, and to have written one poem as good as 'Tired Metaphor' is enough for any writer in any year

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

Arresting... Reminds us that the best poetry is often that which never makes it from the notebook

Patrick McGuinness writes of the other country of childhood with Proustian élan and Nabokovian delight

A deeply moving book of poems... Shimmering with the "sweet dark syrup" of humour, and gorgeous sleights of imagery, these are poems of extraordinary grace; they come up for air with their cupped hands empty, yet brimming with light

An extraordinary writer of great compassion

Denise Mina, author of The Field of Blood

The brilliance of Patrick McGuinness's writing has made his memories unforgettable to the reader

Adam Foulds, author of The Quickening Maze

Brilliant... A book alive with understated yearning

In this intimate, confiding poetry collection, McGuinness shows how identity is layered, permeable, always in motion - how we are always actor and audience to ourselves 
 
'This is McGuinness's best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd' 
SUNDAY TIMES 
 
In Blood Feather, a book of doubling and displacement, we see time in a new way: the past, personal and collective, lingering as an ever-present ghost - while lost beyond recall. 
 
The first section, 'Squeeze the Day' - a series of deeply moving poems about the author's mother, displaced between languages - investigates her illness and death; how being bilingual is like having a double, a second self; how each self haunts the other. 'The Noises Things Make When They Leave' elegises today's post-industrial landscapes, their people and professions: sidelined by literature, bypassed by globalisation. The final sequence, 'After the Flood', links the book's themes, seeking a way of seeing things for the first time and the last time simultaneously. Exploring the gaps between languages and between our selves in language, Patrick McGuinness dreams of a new tense in which the world's losses are redeemed: 
 
It's the anniversary of my mother's death, 
and it's my mother's birthday - 
the day she short-circuited the tenses, 
made the current flow both ways. 
 
A clear-sighted, intimate new poetry collection from the prizewinning author of Other People's Countries and Throw me to the Wolves.

Patrick McGuinness

Praise for Blood Feather

This is McGuinness's best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd

An eloquent fusion of the delicate and the direct

McGuinness has a delightfully distinctive voice… His buoyant imagination always carries the day… He can be breathtakingly simple, and to have written one poem as good as 'Tired Metaphor' is enough for any wri ...

This is McGuinness's best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd

An eloquent fusion of the delicate and the direct

McGuinness has a delightfully distinctive voice… His buoyant imagination always carries the day… He can be breathtakingly simple, and to have written one poem as good as 'Tired Metaphor' is enough for any wri ...

This is McGuinness's best collection by far, and stands out from the crowd

An eloquent fusion of the delicate and the direct

McGuinness has a delightfully distinctive voice… His buoyant imagination always carries the day… He can be breathtakingly simple, and to have written one poem as good as 'Tired Metaphor' is enough for any wri ...

Books by Patrick McGuinness

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