The Wolf Pit

A brilliantly written, atmospheric memoir of landscape and family, set in the Yorkshire moors and the Australian outback, by an acclaimed nature writer.

A love letter to a family defined by a desire to make beauty and a gift for telling stories. The Wolf Pit has more quietly desperate heroism than any book I’ve ever read.

Persuasive, atmospheric writing. A love letter to a past world

The book takes on an existential desire to understand who we really are

Will Cohu was born in Yorkshire in 1964. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, from 1992 he freelanced as writer, editor and journalist, mostly for the Daily Telegraph. His books include Urban Dog (2001) and Out of the Woods (2007).His stories Nothing But Grass, and East Coast-West Coast, were both short-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Award. He lives in Lincolnshire.

In 1966 Will Cohu's grandparents moved to Bramble Carr, a remote cottage on the Yorkshire moors. The summers and winters he spent there were full of freedom and light; only after childhood ended was he aware of the price the adults had paid for life in this most romantic of settings. 
 
 
Navigating family tensions and the trials of growing up, Will describes the close-knit community of North Yorkshire and his family's place within it: the shepherd probing the head-high snowdrifts for his flock; the pub landlord obsessed with military uniforms; the village doctor lost in his love for the purple moorland; Will's glamorous RAF parents; and, at the centre of the story, his beloved but enigmatic grandparents. 
 
The Wolf Pit is an enquiring love letter from Will Cohu to his family, and to a changing rural England that is passionate, frightening and funny.

Will Cohu

Gripping, absorbing and brilliantly done. As you read you are captured by a flow of people and emotions. Each era comes to life.

An enticing amalgam of Downtown Abbey and Wuthering Heights… Truly memorable…immensely poignant…deeply sensitive.

A haunting debut... Ever since John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and especially AS Byatt’s Possession, there has been a vogue for novels that alternate between the Victorian age and our own. Nothing But Grass is a cracking addition to this genre.

Thrilling... combines the social engagement of David Peace with Robert Macfarlane's talent for describing the countryside in crisp, fresh language. From ghosts of the Civil War to the meaning of the miners’ strike, this is a beguiling tale about a rural England where questions of power and identity are as pertinent now as they ever were.

Cohu skilfully builds a narrative that reveals the reverberations of the Victorian past - and an enduring mystery - upon the present. He subtly details his characters' feelings, and though the consequences are tragic, they prove fertile material for fine fiction.

Cohu is a writer with a profound understanding of human frailty, and one of the most appealing things about Nothing But Grass is the dignity it grants its characters... There is real compassion in the way the book traces the effects of time on people’s hopes and dreams. These are, for the most part, ordinary working folk, the kind whose lives are rarely taken seriously by literature or in our cultural conversation; Cohu’s book is a powerful and necessary antidote to the tired elitism of so many metropolitan literary novels... Cohu’s insightful, moving depictions of both people and place illuminate what is an accomplished and memorable rural novel

Cohu’s strong characterisation and sure-footed feel for his territory endow Nothing but Grass with the sense of social, psychological and geographical strata being excavated.

In the summer of 1875, two travellers walk south across the Lincolnshire Wolds to a village riven with dark secrets. 
 
 
When Norman Tanner kills his workmate on a cold February morning a century later, he thinks he’s got away with murder. But Norman doesn’t know about the workmate’s girlfriend, or the child that will come back to haunt him; and how he is caught up in a story that stretches back to that Victorian summer. For some in the village of Southby and its nearby grand estate, man is master of his fate, and the world is full of meaning; for others there is nothing but grass.

Will Cohu

Praise for Nothing But Grass

Gripping, absorbing and brilliantly done. As you read you are captured by a flow of people and emotions. Each era comes to life.

An enticing amalgam of Downtown Abbey and Wuthering Heights… Truly memorable…immensely poignant…deeply sensitive.

A haunting debut... Ever since John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and especially AS Byatt’s Possession, there has been a vogue for novels that alternate between the Victorian age and our own. < ...

Gripping, absorbing and brilliantly done. As you read you are captured by a flow of people and emotions. Each era comes to life.

An enticing amalgam of Downtown Abbey and Wuthering Heights… Truly memorable…immensely poignant…deeply sensitive.

A haunting debut... Ever since John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and especially AS Byatt’s Possession, there has been a vogue for novels that alternate between the Victorian age and our own. < ...

Gripping, absorbing and brilliantly done. As you read you are captured by a flow of people and emotions. Each era comes to life.

An enticing amalgam of Downtown Abbey and Wuthering Heights… Truly memorable…immensely poignant…deeply sensitive.

A haunting debut... Ever since John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and especially AS Byatt’s Possession, there has been a vogue for novels that alternate between the Victorian age and our own. < ...

Books by Will Cohu

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