Set largely in Great Falls, Montana, Wildlife is narrated by sixteen-year-old Joe Brinson as he watches his parents’ marriage begin to come apart.

His father, restless and humiliated after losing his job, leaves to fight a wildfire near the Canadian border; his mother responds not with dutiful waiting but with a sudden, destabilising insistence on having a life beyond the family’s collapse.

Joe understands enough to be wounded, but not enough to intervene. Adults call their choices necessity, pride, love or survival; the child watching them sees only that the structures holding the world together are provisional and that parents are merely people who have been granted dangerous authority.

Spare, cold and exact, Wildlife is a novel about masculine failure, economic precarity and the moment a child becomes conscious of adult compromise. It is for readers drawn to restrained domestic fiction in which very little happens outwardly and almost everything is destroyed.

Flamingo paperback, first printing of this edition, 1991. Light cover wear and marking; previous owner’s handwritten inscription inside. Pages otherwise clean and binding sound.