I love stories that play with the natural and supernatural, and ‘The Hunter’s Wife’ is a perfect example. I adore being so absorbed in a story that any paranormal, psychic or supernatural elements seem perfectly plausible, or secondary to the main plot. The Hunter’s Wife is full of beautiful, vivid descriptions of the hunter and his young (psychic!) wife falling in love in a remote cabin in the woods. God, I am revisiting it as I write this, and I’m just so completely in love with all of Doerr’s words. I challenge ye not to succumb to the infatuation also. An extract: “Their first winter passed like that. When he looked out the cabin window, he saw wolf tracks crossing the river, owls hunting from the trees, six feet of snow like a quilt ready to be thrown off. She saw burrowed dreamers nestled under roots against the long twilight, their dreams rippling into the sky like auroras. With love still lodged in his heart like a splinter, he married her in the first muds of spring.”

First published in The Atlantic, May 2001 and available to read here