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Ritve is looking for wild boar.
Glenn is looking for happiness.
Mia is looking after her grandfather who is suffering from Alzheimer’s.
All are living by the forests of Småland in Sweden.
The forests of this Småland are home to a growing population of wild boar that were once on the verge of extinction. Ritve is searching for them, but never seems to have any success in finding them. He sees their destructive nature and chases sightings, but to no avail. Why is something so plentiful continuously out of his reach, but seen by so many others?
Mia wants her grandfather to remember his past, but continually fails even though she has brought him back to his childhood home. Her love and devotion towards him are clear, but it makes no difference. Age has taken its toll and it can never be reversed.
Glenn is an ordinary man with simple ideas and tastes who just want to be happy. He has found his love and his true nature. But will it be enough? His job is only a means to an end. He does not relish it, but he does seem to welcome life and wants to get more from his surroundings and relationships.
Wild Boar is narrated by three very different characters who have come from afar to the isolated community of Småland.
Wild Boar is a poetic masterpiece about animals and people and their different places in a destructively changing ecosystem. The denouement of the book is tragic and compelling as we are shown than none of us can escape the world in which we live. It will take its toll.
Written beautifully, and translated with what we can only assume is infinite care, Wild Boar looks at our past and our future, the planet's past and future and, in the end, it doesn’t appear to hold out much hope for our future.
Jonathan Wilkins is 69. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones’ bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester and Warwick Universities. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.
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