The Wild Inside
by Jamey Bradbury
“An unusual love story and a creepy horror novel—think of the Brontë sisters and Stephen King [...] The architecture of the storytelling is faultless.”
I have always had a knack for knowing the minds of dogs…
A natural born trapper and hunter raised in the Alaska wilderness, Tracy Petrikoff spends her days tracking animals and running with her dogs in the remote forests surrounding her family’s home. Though she feels safe in this untamed land, Tracy still follows her late mother’s rules: Never Lose Sight of the House. Never Come Home with Dirty Hands. And, above all else, Never Make a Person Bleed.
But these precautions aren’t enough to protect Tracy when a stranger attacks her in the woods and knocks her unconscious. The next morning, she glimpses an eerily familiar man emerge from the tree line, gravely injured from a vicious knife wound—a wound from a hunting knife similar to the one she carries in her pocket. Was this the man who attacked her, and did she almost kill him? With her memories of the events jumbled, Tracy can’t be sure.
Helping her father cope with her mother’s death and prepare for the approaching Iditarod, she doesn’t have time to think about what she may have done. Then a mysterious wanderer appears, looking for a job. Tracy senses that Jesse Goodwin is hiding something, but she can’t warn her father without explaining about the attack—or why she’s kept it to herself.
It soon becomes clear that something dangerous is going on . . . the way Jesse has wormed his way into the family . . . the threatening face of the stranger in a crowd . . . the boot-prints she finds at the forest's edge.
Her family is in trouble. Will uncovering the truth protect them—or is the threat closer than Tracy suspects?
The Wild Inside is Jamey Bradbury’s first novel. Winner of the 2019 l’Agence Française de Développement Foreign World Literature Award, The Wild Inside is also available in French, German, Polish, Italian, and Hungarian.
Additional praise for The Wild Inside
“A taut, atmospheric thriller, steeped in the rich setting of the Alaskan wilderness, told in the unique, compelling voice of eighteen-year-old Tracy. Jamey Bradbury has crafted a stunning debut full of secrets and hunger, grief and longing.”
“A lovely and intense novel about the precarious balance of life and death.”
“What Bradbury has created is a remarkable fable of growing up in the new world—violent and sensitive at the same time and dazzlingly written throughout.”