The following edition of the text was used in the creation of this study guide: Kraznahorkai, László. The Last Wolf. Tuskar Rock Press, 2017. Kindle AZW file.

The entire novel unfolds as a single, unbroken sentence from the viewpoint of a disillusioned German academic recounting his recent trip to Extremadura, Spain, to an indifferent Hungarian barman in Berlin. It opens with him arriving at the Sparschwein bar, where his usual beer awaits. He reflects on his cynicism, professional collapse, and disbelief at having been invited to write about Extremadura. Although once a published philosopher, he now feels severed from that earlier self. He is convinced that language is corrupt and meaningless. Still needing money, he verified the invitation repeatedly by consulting contacts who dismissed Extremadura as barren. He eventually accepted the invitation.

He traveled to Madrid, where a translator met him and asked what he planned to write. Overcome by despair and self-doubt, he felt he had nothing to say. He was startled to be received like a celebrated intellectual. He was put up in a top hotel and feted at dinners and events. Back in the bar in Berlin, the barman drily notes that such treatment is hardly surprising.

The man remained anxious in Extremadura, expecting at any moment for the invitation to turn out to have been a mistake. Instead, his hosts assured him complete freedom and resources, asking only that he write about his experience. Paralyzed by self-doubt and convinced he could no longer think or act meaningfully, he felt like a fraud. However, he could not admit it because of their warmth and friendliness. One night he recalled an ecological article he had read which had claimed that the last wolf south of the Duero “perished” in 1983:. "Perished" was a word he found oddly poetic for a scientific article. Mentioning this casually at dinner, he was mortified when his eager hosts treated it as a serious request, phoning contacts to locate the article and its author. Embarrassed and resigned to life’s futility, he let the misunderstanding unfold without protest.

The hosts managed to find the scientist behind the wolf article, who traced the claim to a hunter, Antonio Domínguez Chanclón. Chanclón agreed to meet. He and his translator visited Chanclón, who welcomed them into his modest home where, to their shock, he kept the preserved body of the wolf he killed in a glass case. Chanclón proudly recounted shooting the wolf after startling it with a lighter, then illuminated the case to show the spot where the wound once was. The man sensed a shared pride between hunter and animal.

The man, along with his driver and translator, went to meet José Miguel, a former warden on a nature reserve where the last wolves in the region had been killed. José Miguel took them by jeep to the site of the killings. He insisted that Chanclón’s wolf was not the true “last” wolf. A final pack had been shot later. At the site, José Miguel described the hunter who ambushed the wolves along a path from 1985–88, killing them one by one. Though the wolves sensed danger, they kept returning, as if compelled. Only two survived, refusing to leave the land out of pride. José Miguel condemned the killings as "murder." The man checked with the translator that "murder" was the word he had used.

José Miguel finished his tale of the last wolves. After the pack was hunted down, two wolves survived. The hunter failed to find them and was dismissed. Locals then set traps, and rumors spread that someone was secretly protecting the wolves. In 1989 the pregnant female was hit by a car and died, which devastated him. The story made the translator cry. José Miguel buried the wolf and her unborn cub. José Miguel said that residents falsely assumed the remaining male had fled the region. However, in 1993 a shepherd, Alexandro, shot the final wolf. Haunted by the story ever since, the man reflects that he returned from Extremadura feeling hollow, as if he had locked the region inside his “cold, empty, hollow heart” (71). He keeps rewriting the ending in his mind. The novel closes with him insisting that he is still stuck on that ending.