The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones - Hardcover

"Jack Wolf's extraordinary 18th-century story does exactly what it says on the cover. It's a tale, in the grandest sense of the word. It's raw, at times even extreme. It explores elegantly the eternal dialogue between the head and bones. And it's quite startlingly, and beautifully, bloody ... Jack Wolf delivers his tale with passion, precision and poetry. Those of strong stomach and vivid imagination will find glittering delights in here" (Lloyd Shepherd Guardian)

"This gloriously over-egged pudding of a first novel is set in 1750, and crammed with chunks of history, philosophy and folklore ... Wolf is a superb storyteller who sucks the reader into his fascinating imagination" (Kate Saunders The Times)

"This moving tale of metamorphosis and blurred identity, otherness and liminality ... An extraordinarily controlled and artful book" (Suzi Feay Financial Times)

"Sadist, frequenter of brothels, afflicted by delusions and murderous intentions, Tristan Hart is among the most striking and memorable anti-heroes to have appeared in recent British fiction" (Jonathan Barnes Times Literary Supplement)

"This tale of a conflicted medical man opens in 1750 and evokes historical fiction such as Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Andrew Miller’s Ingenious Pain, and Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor. The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones, Jack Wolf’s debut novel, can stand alongside these modern classics ... This is an extraordinarily controlled and artful book" (Suzy Feay Financial Times)

The year is 1750.

Tristan Hart, precociously talented student of medicine practising under the legendary Dr William Hunter. His obsession is the nature of pain and preventing it; the relationship between mind and matter and the existence of God. A product of the Age of Enlightenment, he is a rational man on a quest to cut through darkness and superstition with the brilliant blade of science.

Tristan Hart, madman and deviant. His obsession is the nature of pain, and causing it. A product of an age of faeries and goblins, gnomes and shape-shifting gypsies, he is on a quest to arouse the perfect scream and slay the daemon Raw Head who torments his dark days and long nights.

Troubled visionary, twisted genius, loving sadist. What is real and what imagined in Tristan Hart’s brutal, beautiful, complex world?