In the Library
The Call of the Wild
Jack London, 1903
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 2.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 7
- Length
- Length 32k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
White Fang
Jack London
White Fang does the same thing, but in reverse, tracing a wild wolf-dog's road toward domestication and love rather than a tame dog's road back into the wild.
£1.99
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness does the same thing, but with a man instead of a dog, stripping civilized restraint away until only appetite and dominance remain.
£1.99
Black Beauty
Anna Sewell
Sewell tells a horse's life from the horse's side, passed from kind owners to cruel ones as Buck is, and the book changed how readers treated working animals.
£1.99
About the book
Manuel, one of Judge Miller's gardener's helpers, owes money to a lottery, and the cheapest thing he can find to cover the debt is the family dog. Buck, part St. Bernard and part Scotch shepherd, wakes inside a crate on a train bound north, and within days a man in a red sweater has taught him what a club means: give way, or be beaten until you do. Jack London strips a spoiled house pet down to muscle and instinct across snow, harness, and blood, and the terrible thing is how natural it starts to feel. Under the huskies' bared teeth, under the crack of the whip, something older than Buck's own memory stirs, a howl he recognizes before he has ever heard it. When John Thornton, the one man who is ever simply kind to him, is murdered by raiders, Buck avenges him and then walks into the trees and does not come back, answering a call that was always going to win. Close the book and your own leash feels looser.