Novelist and journalist Fatima Bhutto jumps right into the fray in the opening section of her new memoir, THE HOUR OF THE WOLF. This story, originally published in the journal Granta, focuses on the harrowing and heartbreaking first pregnancy of her Jack Russell terrier, Coco. It results in a stillbirth, and Bhutto observes Coco seeming to grieve her loss, in part by adopting (against her vet's advice) Bhutto's own hand as a substitute for her missing pup.

This chapter is at times difficult to read. But it also helps set up several of the themes to which Bhutto will return throughout the memoir, especially the pain of loss, the longing for motherhood, and the strong bond between dogs and their humans.

"[Bhutto's] anecdotes serve to provide a background of love and constancy that sustain Bhutto, even as the rest of her life grows increasingly stressful and chaotic."

Throughout, Bhutto relates specific anecdotes about her life with Coco (and, later, with the puppies resulting from a subsequent successful pregnancy), interspersing them with more philosophical and scientific reflections on the historical, cultural and psychological bonds between people and dogs. These anecdotes serve to provide a background of love and constancy that sustain Bhutto, even as the rest of her life grows increasingly stressful and chaotic.

The source of much of this stress is Bhutto’s long-distance romantic partner, known throughout only as "the man." She portrays him as charismatic, almost magnetic, especially in public, but increasingly volatile and emotionally abusive in private. She describes how, over the course of a few years in her late 30s, she repeatedly considers ending their relationship, only to be convinced to make it work a little longer. Part of her impetus for staying with the man is her overwhelming desire to become a mother. Although he exhibits little desire to make a family with her, he offers just enough hope to keep her dangling.

In the background of this developing story is Bhutto's history of loss, specifically the violent death of her father when she was a teenager (which she wrote in a previous memoir). She offers just enough detail about those events here for readers to understand how that prior trauma might affect her more recent relational circumstances.

Fittingly, it's the man's disturbing behavior toward Coco and her pups that finally gives Bhutto the strength to step away and start over. In doing so, she expresses gratitude to her dogs for encouraging her to take time to stop dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, but instead "to remember only that we must live now and do so with purity, free of fear and alive with the possibilities of wonder."