Lara grew up in a vibrant family with five children in Belgium. The youngest child, Wolf, is a lively part of the family, despite the age gap between him and his siblings. Then, all of a sudden, at the age of eighteen he shuts the door of his student room behind him and disappears without a trace.
Six months after Wolf’s disappearance, his body is found frozen to death in a forest in Lapland, Sweden. A diary that is hidden underneath his clothes reveals the wanderings of a lost boy who wanted to die beneath the Northern Lights. Ten years after his death, Lara dares to reread the diary of Wolf’s final journey and between the pages, she not only finds her lost brother, but also herself as a grieving sister who fulfils her brother’s dream to become a writer.
Wolf is an exploration of grief and despair, but also of the power of imagination and storytelling. Lara interchanges her own memories with passages from the diary, desperate emails from her father to her brother, and daydreams about the day when Wolf will finally come home. Against her better judgement, she races to locations of their childhood in the hopes of finding clues of Wolf’s whereabouts. Although more than a decade has passed, she still browses second-hand bookshops in Amsterdam to find that one shop Wolf describes in his diary, hoping that once she finds the right shop, she’ll see her brother lounging on the counter, waiting for his sister to find him amongst the shelves of stories.
With disarming simplicity and elegance, Lara Taveirne makes us privy to a loving family who is left with doubt, grief, and despair when the unthinkable happens. Yet, there is also a lightness to the siblings. Both the elusive Wolf and the sister who was left behind to pick up the pieces of a life so suddenly fractured have an all-consuming faith in the power of storytelling and the irresistible pull of fiction.