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Forthcoming from Graywolf Press in the Fall of 2010
Audiobook rights to Blackstone
 Starred review from Publishers Weekly
Selected as one of the "Best of the Northwest" for fall/winter 2010 by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association
Available Now on Amazon.com
PRAISE:
"Not your father's eco-novel. In compelling, image-driven prose, Ben Percy confounds the old polarities about wilderness and development by sending three generations of men into a doomed canyon, and letting so much hell break lose we can't tell the heros from the villians--which feels exactly right. This is a dark, sly, honest, pleasing, slip-under-your-skin-and-stay-there kind of a book."
Pam Houston, bestselling author of Cowboys are My Weakness and Sighthound
“The Wilding is a compelling action narrative, universal in its dimensions while utterly grounded in specific particulars. Ben Percy is a stunning storyteller. His fearful wildernesses, both physical and psychic, kept me up through the night.”
William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky and The Willow Field
“Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding is a tour de force meditation and treatise on the nature of violence, the violence of nature, man in the wild, and the wild in man—cleverly disguised as a page-turning adventure. Not just a “must” read, but a need read, this book is timely, terrifying, terrific.”
Antonya Nelson, author of In the Land of Men and Female Trouble
"The Wilding is a virtuoso blend of beauty and violence, hope and despair, tough and touching, lust and terror, literary craft and genre plotting. Like James Dickey, Benjamin Percy drags his characters into the wilderness--into a canyon as black as a gaping mouth, where they struggle to stay alive and in control of what makes them human--but for a new generation of readers concerned with the vanishing West."
Danielle Trussoni, author of Angelology and Falling Through the Earth
The Wilding
Percy's excellent debut novel (after the collection Refresh, Refresh) digs into the ambiguous American attitude toward nature as it oscillates between Thoreau's romantic appreciation and sheer gothic horror. The plot concerns a hunting trip taken by Justin Caves and his sixth-grade son, Graham, with Justin's bullying father, Paul, a passionate outdoorsman in failing health who's determined to spend one last weekend in the Echo Canyon before real estate developer Bobby Fremont turns the sublime pocket of wilderness into a golfing resort. Justin, a high school English teacher, has hit an almost terminally rough patch in his marriage to Karen, who, while the boys camp, contemplates an affair with Bobby, though she may have bigger problems with wounded Iraq war vet Brian, a case study in creepy stalker. The men, meanwhile, are being tracked by a beast and must contend with a vengeful roughneck roaming the woods. A taut plot and cast of deeply flawed characters--Justin is a masterwork of pitiable wretchedness--will keep readers rapt as peril descends and split-second decisions come to have lifelong repercussions. It's as close as you can get to a contemporary Deliverance.
Publishers Weekly Starred Review
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