Wild Dog

"Wild Dog" is the debut novel by Finnish writer Pekka Juntti about a young man's search for his true purpose. Nineteen-year-old Samu, against his father's wishes, leaves the mining town and gets a job at a husky kennel in Northern Finland. Thus begins his coming of age - a difficult path lying between the "mine," with its lack of freedom, social conventions, and the hopelessness of numbing stereotypes, and the "kaira" - a world of untouched northern forests, the embodiment of a lost paradise, the essence of all that is real, the very core of Life.
As he discovers the power of pristine nature and realizes his own inadequacy to it, while getting to know the daily life of Finnish villages, seemingly frozen in the past, and inadvertently touching upon the secret history of a local family, the protagonist, in the face of death, chooses love and acceptance of life. This same path - from a semi-wild sled dog, almost a wolf, toward a person who is selflessly devoted and believes in a dream - is traversed by Nanok, one of the lost dogs in the kaira from the husky kennel.
Characterized by a distinctly epic beginning, humanism, and humility before the power of nature, Pekka Juntti's novel is perceived as a hymn to the most valuable thing in human life - the freedom of personal choice.