For almost a decade Rachel Caine has turned her back on home, kept distant by family disputes and her work monitoring wolves on an Idaho reservation. But now, summoned by the eccentric Earl of Annerdale and his controversial scheme to reintroduce the Grey Wolf to the English countryside, she is back in the peat and wet light of the Lake District. The earl's project harks back to an ancient idyll of untamed British wilderness - though Rachel must contend with modern-day concessions to health and safety, public outrage and political gain - and the return of the Grey after hundreds of years coincides with her own regeneration: impending motherhood, and reconciliation with her estranged family. The Wolf Border investigates the fundamental nature of wilderness and wildness, both animal and human. It seeks to understand the most obsessive aspects of humanity: sex, love, and conflict; the desire to find answers to the question of our existence; those complex systems that govern the most superior creature on earth.
Italy in the early 1960s: a dying painter considers the sacrifices and losses that have made him an enigma, both to strangers and those closest to him. He begins his last life painting, using the same objects he has painted obsessively for his entire career - a small group of bottles.
On the windswept front of Morecambe Bay, Cy Parks spends his childhood years first in a guest house for consumptives run by his mother and then as apprentice to alcoholic tattoo-artist Eliot Riley.
The world has changed. War rages in South America and China, and Britain is run by an omnipresent dictatorship known simply as The Authority. Assets and weapons have been seized, every movement is monitored and women are compulsorily fitted with contraceptive devices. This is Sister's story of her attempt to escape the repressive regime.
The Beautiful Indifference is a collection of intensely erotic and disarming tales, which span centuries, contemporary life and the future, and evoke landscapes as diverse as London's metropolis and lake Vuotjrvi in the Finnish wilderness. A woman who chooses not save her drowning lover. A frustrated housewife who arranges an appointment with the mysterious 'Agency'. A girl enamoured with a notorious Cumbrian horse-breeding family who innocently unleashes their wrath. Each story rotates on an axis of survivalism - natural and medical, physical and sexual - so that wolves and humans alike are exposed and hunted across the pages, then hung like elegant trophies.
