Hello and welcome to another book club episode of the book review podcast.

I'm MJ Franklin.

I'm an editor here at the New York Times Book Review,

and this week for Book Club, we're chatting about the hounding by Zenaby Purvis,

a debut novel about a village

grappling with a salacious rumor that a family of girls turns into a pack of wild dogs

in the night.

The Hounding came out last year, and I'm just going to lay my cards out on the table.

I think it's really good.

I had a lovely time reading it.

It got my brain thinking.

I wanted to tell everyone about it. And that made me think, wait a second, I want to tell everybody about it. Let's do it for a book club. So that's what we're here to do today. We're going to talk about this book and joining me in that adventure are a panel of my wonderful colleagues. Just going around the horn, we have Jumanaot-Ti. Hi, Jumana. Hey, MJ.

We have Emily Aiken. Hello, MJ. And Greg Coles. Glad to be here, MJ. All returning book clubbers,

welcome back. Before we dig in, I have my typical admin notes. First, there will be spoilers in this

episode, but to keep this episode and conversation accessible, the first half of the discussion will be

spoiler-free slash spoiler light. We'll talk about the setup. We'll talk about some details,

but we're not going to talk about the ending, where things go. That will be in the second half,

which will be spoiler-filled. That's note number one. And then note number two is, at the end of the

episode, we will reveal our February

Book Club pick. So stay with us until the end to find out what we're going to be reading next.

To get started, could someone give us a brief setup? What is this book, The Hounding?

Sure. So you've set it up for us. It's a debut novel by a British writer, Zenneby Purvis. It is a

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