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  • Published: 29 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529151947
  • Imprint: Hutchinson Heinemann
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $50.00

Lone Wolf

Walking the Faultlines of Europe




From the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award comes an epic walk across the Alps in the footsteps of a wolf, throwing unique light on Europe's mountainous hinterlands at a moment of political and environmental change.

From the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award comes an epic walk across the Alps in the footsteps of a wolf, throwing unique light on Europe's mountainous hinterlands at a moment of political and environmental change.

In 2011, a young wolf named Slavc set out from Slovenia. Tracked by GPS, he travelled a thousand miles through the Alps, arriving four months later on the Lessinian plateau, north of Verona. There had been no wolves in northern Italy for a century, but here he crossed paths with a female wolf on a walkabout of her own. A decade later and there are more than a hundred wolves back in the area, the result of their remarkable meeting.


In Lone Wolf, Weymouth walks Slavc's path, examining the changes facing these wild corners of Europe. Here, the call to rewild meets the urge to preserve culture; nationalism and globalisation pull apart; climate change is radically changing lives; and migrants, too, are on the move.


The result is a multifaceted account of a region caught in a moment of kaleidoscopic flux, from an award-winning writer with a uniquely perceptive eye for detail.

PRAISE FOR ADAM WEYMOUTH

'A really outstanding new contemporary British voice' Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times
'Adam Weymouth takes his place beside the great travel writers like Chatwin, Thubron, Leigh Fermor, in one bound' Susan Hill, DBE
'Dazzling' Kamila Shamsie

  • Published: 29 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529151947
  • Imprint: Hutchinson Heinemann
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 384
  • RRP: $50.00

Also by Adam Weymouth

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Praise for Lone Wolf

Sharing Adam Weymouth’s epic journey across Europe in the footsteps of a pioneering wolf is to walk the knife-edge between the tame and the wild. A bold, beautiful, confronting journey charting a continent buckling under social and environmental pressure. A book about a wolf, about love and hate, and our conflicted relationship with nature and our fellow human beings. A timely and fascinating read

Isabella Tree, author of WILDING

A majestic and hopeful journey, movingly told by one of our master storytellers

Ben Rawlence, author of THE TREELINE

Adam Weymouth has the extraordinary ability to narrate a global story of conflict and climate, migration and intolerance, vulnerability and resilience, through the lens of one species. One instinctively trusts what he writes because his senses are so finely tuned to the natural world - including to us corrosive humans - and his precise prose balances simplicity with depth, erudition and wistfulness.

Tobias Jones, author of THE DARK HEART OF ITALY

An intricate, intimate interweaving of wolf and human worlds, Weymouth's journey acts like a thread that draws the two together. His storytelling is as supple and powerful as the wolf itself, perfectly paced and balanced. A book full of hope for recovery in a fractured continent.

Nick Hunt, author of OUTLANDISH

Through the footsteps of the wolf, Weymouth reveals the ‘faultlines’ of Europe, the faultlines in nature, and some of the faultlines of the human condition. He achieves an imperative of our times: he has written a book that weaves natural ecology to human ecology in one scintillating fabric

Professor Alastair McIntosh, author of SOIL AND SOUL and POACHER'S PILGRIMAGE

Adam Weymouth is a fine, fine writer - beautifully balanced, dexterous, sensitive, and gifted with the ability to create the most haunting images. His portrait of the wolf in this immensely thoughtful and inventive book is astounding and at time jaw-dropping, his account of the natural and cultural world through which it travels profound. Like Bruce Chatwin, he’s equally at home with nature, culture and people and approaches them all with the same insight. Wonderful.

Andrew Holgate

Lone Wolf beautifully explores the intertwined histories of wolves and humans in some of the remotest parts of Europe. Adam Weymouth brings nuance and sensitivity to the fraught question of how humans can – or should – co-exist with the wilder species we live among and has an uncanny ability to bring to life these creatures as they move like quicksilver through the landscape. Lone Wolf encourages us to examine our thoughts around the politics of borders, the management of habitats, and asks questions about how we might live with grace on our planet.

Joanna Pocock,. author of SURRENDER

Lone Wolf is a major addition to the lupine literary canon — at once a gripping animal adventure story and a thoughtful meditation on history, wanderlust, and belonging in a globalized world. Few writers see this mythologized and misunderstood predator as clearly as Adam Weymouth

Ben Goldfarb, author of CROSSINGS and EAGER

Lone Wolf is a fascinating story that travels deep into both the natural and human world to shine a light on the puzzling contradictions within European farms, farming and the agricultural mind. It is a delight to read, and, in the best ways, deeply troubling. I loved this book

Hugh Brody

Beautiful and as propulsive as a dispersing wolf, Weymouth uses the path taken by Slavc to travel into Europe's soul. Engaging deeply with locals about wolves, climate change, modernity, and immigration, Weymouth gives the people he meets room to tell their own stories. The reader comes away with deepened understanding and compassion for people on every side of the debate over Europe's ongoing rewilding. Essential reading for armchair adventurers and for those who wish to explore the sometimes uncomfortable complexities of rewilding on a thoroughly humanized continent

Emma Marris, author of WILD SOULS

A unique and wonderful book. By following the path of a single wolf, Adam Weymouth surveys the state – both social and ecological – of a changing Europe. There is no better observer of the landscape, nor a better guide to the challenges and rewards of returning the wolf to its lost territory across the continent

Sophie Yeo, author of NATURE'S GHOSTS

A wolf's footsteps, followed; a continent's faultlines, traced: Adam Weymouth has made a formidable, thousand-mile foot-journey, both in the tracks of a wolf and into the heart of human-animal relations in contemporary Europe -- and written an exceptional book about it. His prose has a glinting precision of analysis and evocation to it; his intense curiosity and empathy extend across species boundaries as well towards people and landscapes. Weymouth has written a deeply fascinating story, grippingly told -- and produced a second book to stand alongside his outstanding debut, Kings of the Yukon

Robert Macfarlane, author of UNDERLAND

An original and thrilling journey that takes the fragility of human and animal co-existence, and with masterful skill, weaves it into a compelling story for our times

Lois Pryce, author of REVOLUTIONARY RIDE

An excellent book. Literary reportage at its best. Weymouth has the flare of Joan Didion and the eye for striking detail of Ryszard Kapuscinski. In Lone Wolf, Adam Weymouth reaffirms his position as a hugely valuable guide to complicated, contemporary problems – environmental breakdown, human migration, political fragmentation – problems we have no choice but to confront now.

Robert Penn, author of THE MAN WHO MADE THINGS OUT OF TREES