White Fang

Out of that world comes a grey cub, son of the one-eyed wolf and the part-dog Kiche, who opens his eyes in a dim cave and learns first the bright wall of light at its mouth, then hunger, then the astonishing fact of men. He is named White Fang by Grey Beaver, and his life carries him from the tribe's camp through the hands of the cowardly Beauty Smith, who turns him into a caged Fighting Wolf, and onward toward something none of his making has prepared him for.

Alive to famine and the fighting pit, the book keeps turning toward a stranger question: what a creature shaped entirely by violence might become when met, at last, with patience. "Like had been replaced by love," London writes, "and love was the plummet dropped down into the deeps of him where like had never gone."

Here is a book that takes the law of tooth and claw as seriously as any. The door stands open at a frozen campfire, with the whole of a life waiting beyond.