Read what an author says about her new novel and then read the statements (1-8) following the text.
- Mark a statement A if it is true according to the article.
- Mark it B if it is false.
- Mark it C if, on the basis of the article, it cannot be decided if it is true or false.
Write the letters in the white boxes as in the example (0).
Children of the Stone Age
Michelle Paver talks about Wolf Brother
I’m often asked why I stopped writing for adults and wrote Wolf Brother. I didn’t. In fact, I
never planned to write it at all, and when the story took hold, I was busy writing the third part
of a historical trilogy. I had no time to spare for anything, let alone a six-book series about
Stone Age hunter-gatherers.
Then one afternoon when I was leafing through some old notes, I came across a
manuscript I had written at university, 20-odd years before. It was about a boy and a wolf
struggling to survive in a forest. Something about it quickened my pulse. I wanted to rewrite
it.
So I started running scenes in my mind’s eye, like a film. The demon-haunted bear
rampaging through the forest ... Torak, the 12-year old hero watching his father die ... A
stampede of reindeer seen through the eyes of a wolf ... Soon I was scribbling in my
notebook. I lived the adventure alongside Torak and Wolf. The research took me to places I
had never thought I’d see, and I ended up sleeping on reindeer skins in Lapland.
Somebody once said that one’s real life is often the life that one does not lead. That’s
true for me. When I was a child, I wanted a wolf, and a bow and an arrow, and to live like the
Stone Age people. I wanted to build my own shelter and go hunting in the forest. I tried it,
too. I got rid of my bed and slept on the floor for three years. I made tea from different herbs,
and gave it to my little sister.
When I became an adult I didn’t grow out of all that, but it went underground. The
childhood obsessions became a love of archaeology and the natural world; a fascination with
the myths of Inuits and Native Americans; a lasting interest in wolf behaviour. Wolf Brother
came to life when I realised that this was the world I had lost. This was the life I hadn’t led.
0) A
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Wolf Brother is not Michelle Paver’s first book.
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