When There Are Wolves Again

Winner Of The Best Novel Award 2025 From The British Science Fiction Association

'Vivid, tremendous, unforgettable' - KIM STANLEY ROBINSON on WHEN THERE ARE WOLVES AGAIN, the extraordinary speculative novel of past, present and future, a Guardian Best Science Fiction Book of 2025.

Decades from now, two women sit beside a campfire and reflect on their life stories.

Activist Lucy's earliest memories are of living with her grandparents during the 2020 pandemic and discovering her grandmother's love of birds. Filmmaker Hester was born on the day of the Chornobyl explosion and visits the site years later to film its feral dogs in the Exclusion Zone. Here she meets Lux, the wolf dog who will give her life meaning.

Over half a century, their journeys take them from London to the Highlands to Somerset, through protests, family rifts, and personal tragedy. Lucy joins the fight to restore Britain's depleted natural habitats and revive the species who once shared the island, whilst Hester strives to give a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves.

Both dream of a time when there are wolves again.

* * * Winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel 2025 * * *

A novel of life and of hope, WHEN THERE ARE WOLVES AGAIN is perfect for fans of Clade by James Bradley, The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall, and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.©2025 E. J. Swift

Reseñas de la Crítica

Confirming EJ Swift's standing as a writer of urgent, beautifully crafted eco-fiction, her latest novel is haunted by the legacy of Chornobyl. When There Are Wolves Again suggests a new beauty might lie within our reach if we commit, as do Swift's characters, to rewilding, species reintroduction, activism of one sort or another, and a dutiful stewardship of the land. I'm left with a much-needed feeling of optimism.

When There Are Wolves Again is an extraordinary novel, compassionate, urgent, and beautifully written, both intimate and sweeping in its depiction of our natural world and the two women who fight to save it. It has perfectly merged literary and speculative fiction into an instant classic

Written with deep care and fierce hope, When There Are Wolves Again offers thoughtful answers to urgent questions about our future. It's a joy to read - effortlessly controlled and textured, moving in its details yet bold in scope - and a brilliant example of what can be done with the tools of speculative fiction

When There Are Wolves Again is by turns tragic, terrifying, uplifting, poetic, vast in its ambition and devastatingly human in its scale. It carries you along in an almost dream-like state through the best and the worst of the humanity in an age of crisis, imagining a future both heartbreaking and in the end, full of urgent, soaring hope

Wonderful . . . this is what science fiction should be doing now . . . a novel that tackles head-on the hard problem of writing about the near future; it does so with clarity, creativity, an eye for detail, and unfailing empathy

A remarkable work. Beautifully written and sensitively observed, it demonstrates how great speculative fiction can speak to our present and prepare us for the future. Swift has written a powerful and necessary novel, one that beautifully captures the precarity of our current times whilst anticipating and preparing us for the struggles that will inevitably come ahead. It confirms Swift as one of modern speculative fiction's key visionaries, and as one of our most engagingly human writers.

Swift's exquisite writing brings life to everything from soil to sky...It's a novel to make you touch grass, and dream of wolves

The most important, the most courageous, the most uplifting novel I have read in years...one of the UK's brightest younger talents in speculative fiction

One of our best writers. Her new novel more than lives up to the expectations generated by its predecessor [The Coral Bones]