Shiver

Shiver is a novel by the American writer Maggie Stiefvater, published in 2009. It is the first book of her Wolves of Mercy Falls series, and it was a New York Times bestseller.

Grace has lived beside the woods for years, and the animals in it have been part of her ordinary life since she was a child. One wolf in particular has held her attention, and the attention has been returned, which is the strangest thing about the situation and the thing she cannot explain to anybody. When a boy from the town is killed and the wolves are blamed for it, the hunters go into the woods and the animal she has been watching becomes a person in danger rather than a curiosity. The novel alternates between the human world of a small town and the shape-changing one that runs beside it, and the two halves of the story have to do with what it costs to stay human and what it means to leave.

The series continued in three further books, and its cold, lakeside setting gives the central relationship its terms: a season, a change that comes with the weather, and a deadline nobody can argue with.