Robert Downes

The Wolf and The Willow Robert Downes

"The Wolf and The Willow" is a multicultural story of first contact between indigenous peoples and European invaders, set in the bones of ancient America. Willow, a slave of Black and Arab descent is swept up in a doomed 1527 expedition to the New World, where she meets Wolf, a spy for the shamans of the Ojibwe nation.

The book begins in Morocco, where Willow is abducted by pirates. Sold in a slave market in Sevilla, she joins the 1528 expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez to Florida. In the New World, she meets Wolf, a trader, neophyte shaman, and spy for the shamans of the Ojibwe people on a mission to find a mythical animal. Together, they outwit their captors on a mission through the heart of Indian civilization on the Mississippi, culminating at the ancient ruins of Cahokia, outside present-day St. Louis.

Grounded in historical events and extensively researched, the novel brims with adventure, romance and the peaks and chasms of the human spirit.