Penney is a Scottish screenwriter who has drawn this landscape so realistically that the reader feels he is accompanying her stoic characters despite the fact that she has never traveled to Canada herself.

Ross and a half-breed tracker, then two Hudson Bay Company men, set off to find Francis and the murderer, assuming they're not one and the same. Constantly encompassing the novel's multilayered plot is the landscape itself vast and unpopulated, with dangerously frigid temperatures and endless stretches of snow and ice where first Mrs. His mother is worried, for Francis has been gone since the day of the murder. Ross and Angus lost a baby daughter they later adopted Francis, an Irish orphan, who is now 17 and as much a stranger as ever to his parents. They were two of countless immigrants who fanned out from the landing stops at Halifax and Montreal like the tributaries of a river, and disappeared, every one, into the wilderness. Ross, who discovers the murdered trapper, and who came to this remote part of Canada with her husband Angus from Scotland as part of the mid-19th-century Highland Clearances. It's also a historical family saga, focusing on Mrs. The Tenderness of Wolves is in part a murder mystery, opening with the brutal killing of a French-Canadian trapper near Dove River, a small settlement in Canada's northern territory. Stef Penney's mesmerizing debut novel, winner of Britain's Costa Book of the Year Award (formerly the Whitbread Award), entertains on several levels.

The tenderness of wolves by stef penney