The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales

Arthur Quiller-Couch was a master of the told tale, and this collection proves why: each story feels pulled from some older, stranger world, spoken aloud in a room lit by firelight. The collection opens with Snorri Gamlason's frozen nightmare in 1358 Greenland, where a merchant encounters a ship trapped in ice, its passengers suspended between life and death, their story threaded with the miraculous. From there, Quiller-Couch carries readers across frozen seas and onto the haunted moors of his native Dartmoor, trading in ghosts and goblins, Viking sagas and medieval saints. The prose has an antique musicality, full of archaic cadences that make the supernatural feel not quaint but genuinely uncanny. These are stories where the unknown is not explained away but left glowing at the edges, mysterious and enduring. Quiller-Couch writes with the confident ease of a storyteller who knows exactly how to hold an audience. The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales is for readers who want to be transported, who miss the feeling of a book that feels like it was written for winter nights and dim rooms.