The Wolf and His King by Finn Longman
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Chronically ill-coded queer MC, gay MC, secondary MLM character, M/M
PoV: Third-person, present-tense; 2nd-person, present-tense
Published on: 27th November 2025 (UK); 27th January 2026 (US)
ISBN: 1399621025
Goodreads

Madeline Miller meets Angela Carter in this spellbinding queer retelling of the 12th-century tale of Bisclavret the werewolf—unmissable for fans of Uprooted by Naomi Novik, Swordcrossed by Freya Marske, and The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden.

A noble knight hiding the beast inside. A lonely king isolated by his courtiers. Between them an impossible gulf surmountable only by the twists and turns of relentless destiny in this spellbinding retelling of Marie de France’s classic 12th-century tale of romance and adventure.

The wolf-sickness strikes always without warning, stealing Bisclavret’s body and confusing his mind. Since boyhood he hasn’t dared leave his isolated holdings—not to beg the return of his father’s lost estate, not to seek brotherhood among the court, not even to win the knighthood he yearns for. But when a new king ascends, Bisclavret must deliver his kiss of fealty or answer for the failure.

Half an exile himself, the young king is intrigued by this uneasy, rough-hewn nobleman. Bisclavret seems a perfect knight: bold, strong, and merciful. But he keeps his secrets close, and the king’s longings are not for counsel alone. As his fascination grows, the barriers between them multiply, until the king battles desperation and grief. Then Bisclavret vanishes beyond reach, just as the greatest threats to the kingdom converge. Only duty to his people stands between the king and ruin—duty, and the steady loyalty of the strangest wolf . . .

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~lycanthropy as a metaphor for chronic illness
~royal pining
~names (or their lack)
~can’t have true love without being known
~we stan a green knight

Wow.

It feels like it’s been a while since I read something that so revelled in the craft of writing, that plays with and explores what writing can actually do, why different words and sentence structure and tenses have the effect they have. The Wolf and His King is so very aware of these effects, and every choice that’s been made has been decided with them in mind. The result is a book that feels so incredibly deliberate, and meticulous, where not just every detail of the story but every syllable of every word has been considered and hand-picked and placed with thoughtful care. Longman writes like a jeweller selecting and polishing a thousand shining stones, positioning each one precisely in its place in the golden setting they’ve created for it.

The Wolf and His King is a retelling of the 12th century poem Bisclavret, but if you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry, you don’t need any knowledge of it at all. All you need to know is what Longman tells us in the author’s note at the beginning of the book, which is that this story is a Medieval-inspired fantasy, and trying to pin the setting down to a real-world time or location is only going to give us a headache. With that established, we dive right into the story; the first chapter, labelled Him, introduces us to the eponymous Bisclavret, a nobleman who uncontrollably transforms into a wolf. He has never known why he is this way, and he can’t predict when or how often he changes. He’s never hurt anyone, but the transformation is painful and extremely debilitating, and because of it he lives a solitary, lonely life.

The sense that something is odd here starts quickly; in the first chapter, Bisclavret’s cousin appears, to urge him to go swear his oaths to the new king and ask for his rightful inheritance (better lands where it would be easier to be a wolf). Nothing strange about this! Only there’s something about this conversation…or is it the scene itself? Something…

Chapter two is labelled You, and it’s written in second-person.

To say I was surprised, and extremely excited, is massively underselling my reaction.

What’s ‘odd’ about this book is the way that it’s written. The second-person chapters – the PoV of Bisclavret’s king – are maybe the most obvious example of Longman’s Unusual Writerly Choices, but they are far from the only one. The chapters written from the PoV of Bisclavret-as-wolf – labelled Other, as Bisclacret’s chapters are Him and the king’s are You – are written in VERSE. The thing that was niggling at me in that scene between Bisclavret and his cousin? Was the fact that the cousin is never named. Neither is anybody else: everyone in The Wolf and His King has a title or epithet (which are used consistently, so there’s never any difficulty in identifying who is who) but the only name we learn is Bisclavret’s. !!! HOW COOL IS THAT?

(Longman has written online about the reasons behind some of these writerly choices, but I have very carefully bookmarked those posts for reading AFTER this review is written. There’s no reason you can’t go look them up, though, if you’re interested!)

If you know the plot of Bisclavret the poem, then you can predict the plot beats of The Wolf and His King fairly well; the book sticks pretty close to it. This didn’t bother me in the slightest; yes, I knew what twists and confrontations and whatever were coming, but I reread my favourite stories all the time; knowing the plot before I go in is not a deal-breaker. It’s about what else a book can offer you besides the thrill of a story you don’t know; and The Wolf and His King offers plenty. I already teased some of the incredible craft that’s gone into this book; that alone was enough to make me feel like I was standing in some world-famous art gallery, staring up at a masterwork. But the prose! Longman’s prose is gorgeous, rich; not lush exactly, but jewel-toned, elegant, silken. It dances, quick and gleaming; I lost count of all the lines I had to highlight.

Her touch is feather-light and safe as a hearth

And of course, Longman’s version is overtly queer, which the poem is not. One of the things I loved about this book was how little anyone cared about queerness; if it prevents the king siring an heir, yes, that’ll be a problem – but otherwise? It’s more important that he not show too much favour to any one person than what gender that person is; what matters is the length of time his ‘relationship’ with them lasts, and whether he showers gifts on the lover’s family. When Bisclavret suspects the king might be interested in him that way, the issue is not that they’re both men, and I can assure you now, there is no gay awakening drama-angst anywhere in this book. But equally, this isn’t a classically straightforward romance, where both characters are on a direct line to each other and their happy ending together. There are other relationships, sexual and romantic and both, for both characters before they ‘find’ each other, which was a refreshing change of pace.

the king’s touch, he imagines, would unravel all remnants of his human skin and leave him wild and vicious.

Which is not to say that the romance is not a wonderful one, because it is – the king’s pining is particularly lovely – but readers who go in expecting a romantasy are probably going to be disappointed. The Wolf and His King is richly emotional, and some of that emotion is romantic – but the majority of the pagecount goes to other parts of the story, other plotlines and problems. Some of it was mental health related – I’m not sure if the king has bipolar disorder or ‘just’ repeating cycles of unipolar depression, but I’m pretty sure it’s one or the other.

you have known this ebb and flow of happiness all your life. It comes, and it goes; sunlight one day, shadows the next.

But besides the gorgeous prose, what took up most of my attention was Longman’s lycanthropy-as-chronic-illness metaphor – barely a metaphor, really, with the ways Bisclavret’s werewolf-ism manifests. This is another thing Longman’s talked a bit about here and there – it’s what initially put The Wolf and His King on my radar – but I think a lot of readers are going to catch it even if they don’t go in expecting it. I have fibromyalgia: for me, this aspect of the book was a gut-punch. To say I felt seen is putting it mildly. More than a romance, The Wolf and His King is a story about a chronically ill man trying to find a way to live and be happy – he just happens to find love along the way – and hi, I could talk about this FOREVER. Because the lycanthropy? Pick up any detail – not just about this part of the story, but any other part too – and you’ll find layers and layers of symbolism and meaning and literary wizardry; I was not exaggerating when I said everything in this book – EVERYTHING – is deliberate and intentional.

What this means is that you can, in fact, go all English Lit Degree on this book and hi, I’ve been at this for weeks already and have still not run out of things to marvel over. Every time I think all right, I MUST have unpacked all of Longman’s cleverness by now, I trip over something I forgot to consider, or didn’t even notice the first time. And that’s while being almost completely blind to what Longman’s doing with and saying about Medieval Romances (not what they sound like) and 12th century literature and all the other influences that I have no background in!

I need a bookclub for this book YESTERDAY, is what I’m saying!

But I can talk a bit about the lycanthropy-as-chronic-illness so hi, I’m going to geek out about that and analyse it a bit now. YOU’RE WELCOME.

‘I cannot live my life never looking ahead to better days nor celebrating them when they come for fear that Fortune’s wheel will once more plunge me into sorrow.’

‘The fall is greater from a height.’

‘So is the view.’

To start with, Bisclavret’s divorcing the wolf from himself, insisting they are separate entities, is a very literal Othering, and it’s true that the wolf’s PoV being in verse makes it viscerally distinct from Bisclavret’s third-person prose chapters. But within those verse chapters are Bisclavret’s first-person thoughts, woven through the more ‘animal’ thoughts of the wolf. He doesn’t black out or go to sleep when he changes; he’s still awake, more or less able to direct his wolf-body’s actions, and he can remember what he did. The wolf is not an entirely separate consciousness, more like an altered state of consciousness, like being drunk or on LSD. But I think Bisclavret’s insistence on the wolf as Other is perfectly understandable, and gains more depth in the context of the chronic illness metaphor. I’ve always conceptualised my fibromyalgia as an invader, an Other, not a part of myself, and I know plenty of others do the same with their own disabilities. Bisclavret hates what his condition does to him, like I do mine, and so can’t or won’t accept it. He never calls himself a ‘garwolf’ – this setting’s term for werewolf – never thinks of himself that way; it painfully echoes my own decade-long struggle to accept ‘disabled’ as a descriptor, label, for myself.

And that refusal to accept his disability is what leads to his – let’s call it a ‘downfall.’ There’s a difference between living your life to the fullest with your disability, and trying to have the life you could have if you weren’t disabled; when Bisclavret does the former, in his days at the castle as a new knight, he is stupendously happy, and all is well. When he tries to pretend he isn’t disabled at all – when he marries someone who doesn’t know about his transformations, and doesn’t tell her – disaster strikes. And yes, you could absolutely spin what is done to him as ableist hatred, if you want to take the metaphor that far; personally I think it’s more an issue of a weak, scared person who was willing to be cruel to be safe, which is terrible, but a kind of understandable too – not that that makes it less evil. On the other hand, that weak, scared person would never have been put in a position to hurt him if Bisclavret had been open and honest.

you mislike the idea of losing him to exile again. Of losing the chance to see what he might become, to tease out the hints of the stubborn, irreverent man you glimpse hiding beneath his shyness. To hone the edge of his rough-hewn beauty and make it something you can bear to look at, without feeling that the air has been stolen from your lungs.

We see this in the two love stories Bisclavret has, love stories that form perfect mirror-images of each other. View Spoiler »There is Bisclavret and the woman he marries, who for the longest time does not know about his condition, his transformations – and there is Bisclavret and the king, who for a very long time only knows Bisclavret as the wolf, with no clue that his lupine companion is the knight he loves. « Hide Spoiler The message isn’t subtle: you can only have true happiness with someone who knows you completely, who isn’t afraid of the wolf you turn into – the ‘monster’ you become when you’re sick, exhausted, in pain. Who loves you when you’re healthy and when you’re a ‘monster’. Anyone who only loves one side of you is not someone you should build a life with. Not if you want a happy ending, anyway!

secrets are less bitter shared, until the sharing shows its teeth.

One of the quieter but still fascinating things about this book is how…sometimes things just happen. A secondary character leaves the kingdom, and we never hear from him again. Someone takes a lover, a minor character who has never come up before, and leaves the story very soon after. I could understand if some readers found this frustrating – we’re used to fiction that answers every question it raises, where everyone who appears is relevant – but for me, it gave The Wolf and His King a refreshingly life-like quality. Because this is what life is like; not everyone who enters your life has a major impact on you; not everyone who leaves your life comes back, even if you love them. You don’t always learn a person’s secrets, no matter how curious you are. And this aspect of the book feels like a deliberate contrast to the Medieval Romance of it all, the fact that this story is taking place in a dream of a kingdom, a ballad, a land so lightly anchored in history it doesn’t even have a name. Equally, this quiet realism meshes perfectly with the ‘reality’ of lycanthropy-as-chronic-illness, helps underline how very real Bisclavret’s pain and struggles are…even if, in this story, those struggles are ‘being a werewolf.’

In their sermons and prayers they speak of man being made in God’s image, but what does that mean when his own shape is so changeable? Is it his soul or his body that reflects the Almighty? For if it is his body, then either the Lord is more strange than has been preached to him, or he spends at least part of his time outside of the glories of creation, some uncreated thing.

I loved it. I love it. The Wolf and His King is a book I’m going to cherish; it’s beautiful and painful and I’ve never felt so seen. Longman is a genius and a jeweller with words and story, and I predict months if not years of delight in teasing out the significance of every totally-innocuous detail of their debut.

This one’s genuinely something special, and it needs to be on your bookshelf.

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