My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir

Longlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award A Best Book of 2024: Kirkus, The Independent, and the New York Public Library A New York Magazine Most-Anticipated Book of the Fall A Library Journal Top Title of the Season From the acclaimed author of Ghost Wall, Summerwater, and The Fell, Sarah Moss’s My Good Bright Wolf is an unflinching memoir about childhood, food, books, and our ability to see, become, and protect ourselves. A girl must watch her figure but never be vain. She must be intelligent but never a know-it-all. She must be ambitious, if she is clever, but not in a way that shows. She must cook and sew and make do and mend. She must know (but never say) that these skills are, in some fundamental way, flawed and frivolous—feminine. Girls must stay small, even as they grow. Women must show restraint. And yet. In books, in the landscape of imagination, a girl can run free.