“Talking to the Wolf is evocative, rich, and simply bursting with rage and love. A gorgeous novel about the kinds of lifelong friendships that are both the wound and the salve, the raging storm and the hush of dawn.”

—Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds and Florida

Rebecca Chace’s Talking to the Wolf is so richly peopled I feel like I could put a letter in the mail to any of its characters. Each of them is so full of singular life, so delightfully, painfully earnest in their messy trying. This is a book about friendship, family, love, memory, and the metamorphic, often corrosive, effect of time on each. As Chace’s characters move into shaky reunion, their pasts and presents tangle and fray, forcing them to finally put into words what has for too long remained unspoken. After all, as one of them concludes, “There might be a song in it.”

— Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

“This tale of four friends (one a ghost) takes us across thirty-five years of tumultuous attachment. How alive these women are—including the dead one—and how forever bonded, even with their separate versions of the truth. A terrific book.”

— Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness

Talking to the Wolf is a stunning, intricate portrayal of close female bonds forged in adolescence. It’s a story about how our ideas of success change over time, and the mysterious ways that our deepest friendships both hold us and release us. Rebecca Chace has written an intimate, luminous, and deeply absorbing novel, one that I didn’t want to end.

—Rene Steinke, novelist and National Book Award finalist