Elowen

In the summer of 2017, Will and his wife Amy lose their baby, Elowen, a few days before their due date. Unmoored by sadness, what becomes clear in the weeks and months following Elowen’s death is that there is no established vocabulary with which to understand this experience, either for Will or the people around him. He discovers, there is no word in the English language for a parent who has lost a child. Without any linguistic or emotional scaffold, the disorientation of his grief feels ever more lonely and alienating. This title charts the darkness of Will’s grief over the course of two years with unflinching honesty, but it also describes in sonorous prose what sustains him: the natural world, and in particular the silence and attentiveness of tracking wolves in the forests of Sweden.