At the edge of a pond, in a hollowed tree stump her whole family spent a winter carving for her, Halia watches the ducks while her mother threads a chain of daisies. Vesela settles it round her daughter’s neck and tells her she is like the flower: no show of muscle, but the kind of strength that grows in the thinnest crack and outlasts the frost. Agata the goat tries to eat Halia’s hair. It is a quiet scene in the back half of The Wolves of War by John Gwynne, a novel with no shortage of severed heads, and it is the one that explains everything else.
Halia is thirteen. Her right leg is twisted, her hand curls against her chest, and the words she means come out as sounds nobody else can follow. Her father feeds her with a spoon he tests against his own lip first. Some of their neighbours make warding signs when she passes. What none of them know is that when she sleeps, she runs.
A Girl Who Runs Only in Her Dreams
The novel opens her story on a frozen river, where she hunts an elk with a black wolf called Ink and a silver one called Moon, and wakes in her bed with blood on her cheek. The dream is real, and so is the anger that begins to leak out of her in the waking world, spilling milk, flaring the hearth, shaking a meadow. Gwynne resists the obvious move. Her gifts do not mend her body, and the book never suggests her body needed mending. What it needs is people who will not look away, and her family supplies them in abundance: a father who carries her for a whole day, three brothers who bicker like geese, a mother who promises violence to anyone who threatens her girl.
The household also includes Root, a domovoi with a voice like a mouth full of gravel and a taste for kvass, who has quietly attached herself to the family for reasons she is slow to explain. Her friendship with Halia carries the book’s best dialogue, and its most surprising revelation about who has been teaching whom. She is also the last of her kind, a fact she lets slip to the wolves with a sorrow that says more than any backstory could. Few fantasy novels make a household spirit this funny and this lonely at once, and The Wolves of War by John Gwynne is better for every page she bustles across.
The Northman at the Table
Against that warmth, Gwynne sets Dagmar Wolf-Snarl, a grizzled oarsman who drinks to keep from remembering and keeps a promise to a woman long dead. He is sworn to protect her grown children, Katla and Snorri, and he has never given them anything but survival. When fortune washes him into Ivan’s kitchen, half drowned and wholly suspicious, the novel finds its loveliest strand. The first breakfast he eats there, shovelling porridge and onions with his wrong hand while a girl he does not know smiles at him, is funnier and more moving than any battle in The Wolves of War by John Gwynne.
That thaw is the thesis. A hard man learns what a family looks like and feels ashamed of what he failed to give his own. The cost is that Katla and Snorri, so vivid in the early chapters, simply drop out of the final third, and their absence is felt.
History Waiting in the Wings
The third strand belongs to Ingvar, prince of Kyiv, back from war with the empire to the south and wary of the Christian bishop he has let into his city. He is Gwynne’s version of the historical Igor, his clever wife Helga is Olga, and their small son is the future Sviatoslav. Anyone who knows the chronicles knows what the Drevlyans did to Igor, and Gwynne lets that knowledge hum under every scene. The court chapters are slower than the forest ones, heavy with councils about baptism and whether a prince should keep a witch of his own, but they pay off. The most chilling of them has nothing to do with battle. Ingvar’s priestess brings him a teenage girl whose village hanged her as a witch and failed to kill her, and the prince, who has just watched one witch fell his champion without a blow, recruits her on the spot. It is a cold, practical choice, the same one Mal has made, and the book quietly lets the two rulers mirror each other.
Over all three strands looms Iaga, who wears the iron teeth of the Baba Yaga of folklore and none of her comedy. She leaves frost wherever her bare feet touch, and she calls herself, among other names, Child-Stealer. In a book this kind to its children, that is the worst threat imaginable, and The Wolves of War by John Gwynne takes the threat with complete seriousness. The violence throughout is graphic, with torture, slavery, mutilation and the deaths of animals and of people readers will have grown to love, and the grief that follows is written at full weight.
Where the Wolves of War Thin Out
The weaknesses are real. Yakun, the red-haired elder who calls Halia a witch, is a single note sustained across the whole novel, and a late betrayal is unpicked in one speech after the fact instead of being built where readers could see it. Gwynne’s tics are present too: warriors grunt, moments stretch, and characters keep agreeing that a thing is a truth. Most of all, The Wolves of War by John Gwynne is the first half of a duology and behaves like one. Its last page is a beginning, and readers should go in knowing that.
John Gwynne, Turning East
Gwynne, born in 1968, studied and later taught at the University of Brighton before his first novel was published. He built his name on two sprawling series, The Faithful and the Fallen and Of Blood and Bone, the second of them bought by Tor in a six-figure deal, and then turned Norse with the Bloodsworn Saga, from The Shadow of the Gods to The Fury of the Gods. This book is a departure into Slavic myth and the Rus.
It is also personal. The dedication is to his daughter Harriett, and his acknowledgements say a character in the novel was inspired by her, that writing her brought both smiles and tears. Readers who reach the end will not need to be told which character he means.
Where It Leaves You
Readers who liked Godkiller by Hannah Kaner for its small company travelling through a world of hungry gods should find the same blend of tenderness and blood here, and Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless offers a darker, stranger dive into the same Russian and Slavic folklore. The Wolves of War by John Gwynne, published on 3 November 2026, asks for patience with its court and forgiveness for its unfinished shape. In return it gives a silent girl the loudest heart in the forest, and a family that would follow her anywhere.