Page Turners – April 2026 review

In April the Page Turners read ‘The Tenderness of Wolves‘. This debut novel by Scottish born Stef Penney was published in 2006 and won the Costa Prize for ‘Book of the Year’. We were all unsure why the book had this title as there is very little written about wolves.

The book is set in a remote area of Canada in the 1860s. It opens with the brutal murder of a trapper and follows the stories of those who are trying to discover what happened. The majority of the story is told in the first person by Mrs Ross, who is trying to locate her son who disappeared on the day of the murder. The murder is being investigated by men from the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company and also by a former journalist and their sections are told in the third person. Much of the action concerns treks across the snowy wilderness tracking those who have gone before, or events in small remote communities.

Many of us liked the descriptive writing which gave a good sense of the north Canadian desolate countryside in winter and the treks across it and we enjoyed the insight into how the Hudsons Bay company operated. However we all found the book to be overly long which can apparently be an issue for new novelists. Despite the length, not everything was clear at the end of the book and it was felt that some of the detailed sub stories could have been excluded in favour of rounding the ending more fully.

Overall, we were polarised in our view and enjoyment of the book. Half of us really enjoyed it and found it to be a page turner while the others were less enthusiastic with comments about getting confused by too many characters and side stories. I think all of us found the amount of trekking in cold inhospitable parts of Canada became a bit tedious at times.

Although the book is described as being a crime thriller we did not really think it fitted that genre.  There was a crime, with a murder at the beginning, but most of the book is about searching and trekking and, in the case of Mrs Ross, perhaps finding oneself while enduring considerable hardship on an arduous journey.

If you are interested in reading this book for yourself and making your own mind up about whether it is a page turner or not, do get in touch and arrange to borrow a copy.

Deborah Wallis, convenor