Two Wolves has just passed a miraculous milestone – 100,000 copies sold in Australia and New Zealand. (Penguin Random House Australia has created a post about it.) And to think it was a book that I wrote after deciding to give up on chasing commercial ideas. I’d thought, ‘If the books are only selling a few thousand copies, I might as well write what I really want to write.’ There’s probably something in that.
I’m very thankful to the team at Penguin Random House Australia who believed in the book – Zoe W, Dot, Zoe B, Tina, Angela and the team at that time. And also the kids, teachers, booksellers and others who have supported and shared the book. Without them, it would have sold five copies. All to my mother.
TWO WOLVES JOURNEY
The pic above is the moment the first copies arrived, back when one of my sons had very few teeth and was more than a centimetre shorter than me (the current count that I’m gripping onto for dear life. My other son is 6’4 😱). A lot has changed since that time. The story won some awards and has been a play, an audiobook and it’s used in schools. I’m mucking around with a sequel at the moment and I’ve written a feature script and I’m hoping to see it adapted for the screen soon.
But, also, not much has changed at all. Writing a book is still a mostly pleasurable, but often painful challenge. Two Wolves was the first time I really dug down deep and felt like I was risking something as a writer. It took me five years and I had no idea if I could do it, but I had to keep going. I trusted it. I’ve tried to do that every time since but Scar Town, which comes out August 2023, gave me the same feeling. It has been thirteen years from first draft to release, but I just kept trusting the feeling the story gave me. It feels like a similarly personal story. It’s both nothing like my life and intensely personal, somehow.
TWO WOLVES EXTRA MATERIALS
If you’d like to watch the Two Wolves book trailer, check out the teaching materials, listen to the book soundtrack, discover the influences on the story and read the first chapter, see the Two Wolves page. If you’d like to buy a copy, visit the Penguin page here. And if you’ve read it and liked it, maybe you want to try one of the other books below. Happy reading!
