Wolf Bells

A Novel

By: Leni Zumas

The acclaimed author of Red Clocks returns with a biting, lyrical novel about an intergenerational group home run by an ex-musician determined to make a place for those without one

On a bluff above a river rises The House, where elderly and disabled residents live alongside young people who help out in exchange for free rent. The community is led by a former punk singer who never wanted to be responsible for anyone yet now finds herself the caretaker of this precarious collection of lives. It’s not a family, exactly, but it’s got the complicated, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious, dynamics of kinship.

When two kids—Nola and her little cousin James—show up on The House’s back porch in need of refuge, the whole experiment is thrown into question. All are welcome here, or that was the idea. But the authorities are looking for these children, and The House’s finances are teetering on the edge.

Zumas’s long-anticipated third novel wrestles with America’s crisis of care in a taut, aching, polyphonic tale that moves as fast as the crackling comebacks that fly between The House’s residents over breakfast. As the rules of the outside world start to press in on this safe haven, listeners will find themselves asking, what would the world look like if everyone had a place to belong?

©2025 Leni Zumas (P)2025 Algonquin Books

Critic reviews

“At once a fable, a cautionary tale, a sitcom, an elegy, and a no-frills utopian roadmap, Wolf Bells howls with the thrill of life and death intertwined. This is a brave book about trauma and persistence, aging and intergenerational kinship, and the frustration, conflict, and connection in caring for one another. Reshaping the world out of a broken history, Leni Zumas shows us how to dream.”—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art

“Unflinching, hilarious, and radical. In Wolf Bells, Leni Zumas has written the most humane of books; an essential and audacious novel that we need, urgently, in these fearful, fearsome times. Wolf Bells challenges us to imagine a new way of living; in true community, mutually caring and compassionate and free to speak our dissent. I would love to live in The House, the fictional residence Zumas has created, with all its aches and pains and complications and tender, precarious solidarity.”—Miriam Toews, bestselling author of Fight Night and Women Talking