Wolves of Eternity

In 1986, twenty-year-old Syvert Loyning returns from military service to his mother's house in southern Norway, where the death of his father still hangs over the family. Searching through his father's belongings, he uncovers a cache of letters in Russian that point to a life and a connection no one told him about, and that quietly reroute the course of his years as he works, falls in love, and eventually becomes an undertaker. Far away in Moscow, a gifted biology student named Alevtina sets aside her ambitions to raise her son and watches her country move through a decade of upheaval. Her friend Vasilisa, meanwhile, is writing about an old strand of Russian thought that took the dream of eternal, bodily life seriously. Across hundreds of pages the narrative lingers on ordinary days, grief, parenthood, and the slow accumulation of a life, while pressing at the largest questions of mortality, faith, and what the dead leave behind. Expansive and unhurried, it gathers its two distant lives toward a single horizon, returning again and again to the strange persistence of the human wish to go on living.