The Wolves of Midwinter: The Wolf Gift Chronicles Audiobook (Free)

The tale of The Wolf Gift continues .

In Anne Rice’s surprising and compelling best-selling novel, the first of her strange and mythic imagining from the world of wolfen powers (“I devoured these pages . . . As solid and participating as anything she’s written since her early Vampire Chronicles fiction”-Alan Cheuse, The Boston Globe; “A delectable cocktail of old-fashioned lost-race experience, shape-shifting, and suspense”-Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post), readers were spellbound as Rice about The Wolves of Midwinter: The Wolf Gift Chronicles conjured up a daring new world established against the outrageous and beckoning California coast.

Now in her new novel, simply because lush and romantic at length and atmosphere as it is sleek and steely in storytelling, Anne Grain takes us once more towards the rugged coastline of Northern California, to the grand mansion in Nideck Point, and additional explores the unearthly education of her transformed Man Wolf.

The novel opens on the cold, gray landscape. It’s the beginning of Dec. Oak fires are burning in the stately flickering hearths of Nideck Stage. It is Yuletide.

For Reuben Golding, now infused with the Wolf Gift and beneath the caring tutelage of the Morphenkinder, this promises to be always a Christmas like no other . . .

The Yuletide season, sacred to much of the people, has been equally sacred to the Man Wolves, and Reuben shortly becomes aware that they, too, steeped in their own profound rituals, will celebrate the ancient Midwinter festival deep inside the verdant richness of Nideck forest.

From out of the shadows of Nideck comes a ghost-tormented, imploring, unable to speak yet able to embrace and desire with desperate affection . . . As Reuben discovers himself swept up with-and drawn to-the passions and yearnings of this spectral presence, and as the swirl of preparations reaches a fever pitch for the Nideck town Christmas festival of music and pageantry, amazing secrets are uncovered; secrets that tell of a strange netherworld, of spirits apart from the Morphenkinder, generations previous, who inhabit the thick stretches of redwood and oak that surround the magnificent house at Nideck Point, “ageless ones” who possess their very own fantastical ancient histories and who taunt using their dark magical capabilities . . .

Includes the Original Music “Exiles (The Wolves of Midwinter),” Performed by Mary Fahl