When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift

In 2024, EJ Swift released the climate fiction novel The Coral Bones. That book took the Great Barrier Reef as its central location and explored it in the past, present and future. The interesting aspect of The Coral Bones was Swift’s focus on resilience and adaptation. Her future is a difficult one but it is also one in which humanity has found ways to accommodate changes in climate. In her latest book When There Are Wolves Again, Swift does something similar, exploring the idea of rewilding as a response to climate change. And in this case her location is the whole of Britain.

The story of When There Are Wolves Again revolves around two women. Hester was born on the day of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and as a result feels herself connected to that place. So much so that as a film maker she goes there in the 2020s to document the attempted rehabilitation of the dog population, which had been left to go wild in the intervening 35 years. In doing so she ends up adopting a half wolf pup she calls Lux. Born thirty years later is Lucy, who is sent to live with her grandparents during the COVID lockdowns and in doing so learns about nature and the need to fight climate change. Later both will become involved in projects to rewild different parts of Britain. They never meet but their lives touch over the next fifty years as those projects gain traction.

When There Are Wolves Again is at its heart an incredibly optimistic piece of climate fiction. Much like The Coral Bones, Swift does not sugar coat the potential impacts of climate change, envisaging a disastrous heat wave in the 2030s. But she is focussed on what could happen if people took the environment seriously, if they worked to together to bring about a change that would make the landscapes they were living in more resilient and more resistant to dangerous changes. Over time she charts the changing of the British landscape and the reintroduction of species that had long since become extinct there.

In a literary landscape full of doom and gloom climate fiction it is refreshing to encounter an author who is selling a different message, That the future is not fixed, that everyone has the capacity to change and that we can make a difference if we want to and are prepared to work with the environment rather than against it.

When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift

8.5

8.5/10