White Wolf

“Every home is a different story,” says one narrator in White Wolf while looking for her own childhood home. Every unhappy home is unhappy in its own way—and so are the stories in Krisztina Tóth’s new volume, in which the writer’s voice is darker and more radical than ever.

These are stories of trauma, oppression, submission, exclusion, stigma, and violence. Many of them tell of childhood abuses, unpunished crimes, lost children—suffering that goes without punishment, apology, and forgiveness. Her mostly nameless heroes are everywhere around us, stepping into the same elevator, running behind us on the staircase. Many of them are so wounded or tormented that they behave in strange ways. In White Wolf, Tóth observes these characters with acute sensitivity and attentiveness to detail.