In Anne Rice's surprising and compelling best-selling novel, the first of her strange and mythic imagining of the world of wolfen powers, readers and listeners were spellbound as Rice conjured up a daring new world set against the wild and beckoning California coast.

Now in her new novel, as lush and romantic in detail and atmosphere as it is sleek and steely in storytelling, Anne Rice takes us once again to the rugged coastline of Northern California, to the grand mansion at Nideck Point, and further explores the unearthly education of her transformed Man Wolf.

The novel opens on a cold, gray landscape. It is the beginning of December. Oak fires are burning in the stately flickering hearths of Nideck Point. It is Yuletide. For Reuben Golding, now infused with the Wolf Gift and under the loving tutelage of the Morphenkinder, this promises to be a Christmas like no other...

The Yuletide season, sacred to much of the human race, has been equally sacred to the Man Wolves, and Reuben soon becomes aware that they, too, steeped in their own profound rituals, will celebrate the ancient Midwinter festival deep within the verdant richness of Nideck forest.

From out of the shadows of Nideck comes a ghost - tormented, imploring, unable to speak yet able to embrace and desire with desperate affection …. As Reuben finds himself caught up with - and drawn to - the passions and yearnings of this spectral presence.

Includes the Original Song "Exiles (The Wolves of Midwinter)", Performed by Mary Fahl.

"I devoured these pages . . . As solid and engaging as anything she has written since her early Vampire Chronicles fiction." (Alan Cheuse, The Boston Globe)

"A delectable cocktail of old-fashioned lost-race adventure, shape-shifting, and suspense." (Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post)