While at times my reading style is a little meandering, moving between two or three novels, maybe a memoir or an essay, a range of things that are almost but not quite capturing me, other books take me by the throat and do not let me go. Two brilliant debut novels, Idaho by Emily Ruskovich and History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, grabbed me in this compulsive violent way, and indeed forms of violence are at the core of both novels, though to reduce their scope to this alone does not do justice to either.

Idaho explores an unspeakable act of violence which rends apart a seemingly ordinary outing in the woods for a family; father Wade, mother Jenny, and two little girls, June and May,  aged eight and five. May is suddenly, violently, killed by her mother and June flees into the woods never to be found again.