Tell The Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

Tell The Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt will be published in June 2012 by MacMillan, after they were successful in winning a competitive five-way auction for it.


This book is an extraordinary debut from a novelist who is skilled in her craft, her characters are created perfectly and leap from the page to take a part of your own life whilst you are reading.
Junie Elbus, fourteen-years old and a little quirky, she could even be called a geek if you like.  Nobody understands her except for her Uncle Finn.    Uncle Finn, a talented artist, a man who treats Junie as if she were a queen, who takes her places, shows her new things and lets her be herself.   Uncle Finn, who is dying of AIDS and wants his final gift to Junie to be an extra special portrait of her and her sister.
It is not until Finn dies that Junie discovers that she wasn't in fact, the centre of his world.  Junie discovers that Finn had a 'special friend', Toby, and that according to her Mom and Dad, Toby murdered Finn.

Carol Rifka Brunt

Junie needs to know more and as she and Toby start their secret friendship she discovers more and more about her Uncle Finn, and also about herself and her family.
Junie's older sister Greta has always been the successful sister, the actress, the singer.  Junie knows however, that Greta's best piece of acting is the way she appears to others, underneath is a struggling, sad girl who hates herself and most things around her.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home is a story of people, there is no fast-paced plot line, it is a gentle unpeeling of a family and it's secrets.  Each character plays their own part with Junie and Finn at the centre.  Yet the author never really 'meets' Finn, he dies almost before the story begins, yet it is his influence and his character that forms the rest of the novel.

Gentle, beautiful, captivating and quite brlliant.