Well done again, Adam!

This morning, I received another email from Adam Weymouth, one of my old students at Norman Court. That is Adam, on the right, in the white shirt.

As well as coming to the Czech Republic with a group of Norman Court students, I also remember Adam as my brilliant Mortimer in Arsenic and Old Lace and then he went on to Winchester College. He has become quite a talented writer and in fact he won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award for his first book, Kings of the Yukon.

Well, yes, it is all about salmon, but it is certainly not the rather tame but decidedly yummy fish from Kaufland that goes so well with my wife's homemade mayonnaise and a glass of Chardonnay. It is all about wild salmon in Alaska, in case you were wondering. Adam's writing is really rather good and it has a kind of poetry, a flowing and liquid quality that fits in with the fishy subject. However, the book is also very much about the human / fish interactions along the way, as the salmon migrate. 

Although in many ways Kings of the Yukon is a beautiful book, I felt that there was also a kind of underlying sadness. For how much longer will these salmon be able to make their amazing journeys? Is the human impact on the natural world becoming so great that the fundamental rhythms of our planet are being disturbed and lost? 

I read somewhere that wolves are actually much better creatures and that they are more beneficial to this planet than we humans are. Anyway, Adam's new book is called Lone Wolf and, as you have probably guessed, it is about a wolf. "What big teeth you have, Grandma!" seems to sum up our childhood fear of wolves and maybe that is what leads us to misunderstand (and mistreat) this species. 

Adam's young wolf starts off in Slovenia, crosses the Alps and there he meets his Italian wolfie wife. (Sometimes you have to travel a bit in order to find your other half. I had to go all the way to the Crimea.) And yes, they do have puppies or cubs or whatever wolf babies are called. 

This book is supposed to be about a wolf, but I have a hunch that really it isn't. My guess is that the book's real, underlying theme is the impact that we loopy (not lupine) humans are having on our environment and the friction between farming, politics and wildlife. 

All of the critics seem to think that Lone Wolf is really well written and let’s hope that it sells lots of copies.